Open Build Service adds support for Arch Linux

We are happy to announce that the Open Build Service (OBS) is now able to build the package format used by Arch Linux! With this new format you can deliver automatic, consistent and reproducible builds of your software to your users and customers for yet another Free and Open Source Software distribution. In total the OBS now supports 10 base distributions in more than 20 flavors and versions.

Last years Google Summer of Code marked the beginning of this endeavor when Nikolay Rysev started to add all the necessary features to to support, after the RPM Package Manager (RPM) and the Debian package management system (deb), the third package format in the OBS. And with the latest deployment the OBS Team has rolled out the last missing features to the OBS reference server to support this.

Arch Linux

Arch Linux is a lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that has the core principles of focus on simplicity (from the developers view), elegance, code correctness, and minimalism which all stem from the most popular Keep it simple, Stupid (KISS) principle. It’s packages are built for 32it and 64bit architecture, it has a rolling release model and uses a package manager written specifically for Arch Linux: pacman.

How to build Arch Linux packages

All you need to do is to add the Arch:Extra repository to your OBS project and a PKGBUILD description to your package sources and the OBS will build and publish a repository of .pkg.tar.xz packages.

All your users need to do is to add this repository their pacman configuration

About the Open Build Service

Comprehensive

The Open Build Service (OBS) is a generic system to build and distribute binary packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. Your users can always download the latest version of your software as binary packages for their operating system.

Collaborative

The OBS has collaboration build in and will help you to harness the power of the open source development model. Your developers get a one-stop-shop experience for all their software packaging and releasing needs.

Open Source

Of course the OBS is Free Software licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s available for you as source, packages and as easily deployable appliance. You are free to use, fix, extend and re-use the code. Check out our project download page.

Our reference server http://build.opensuse.org is available for all open source developers to build packages for the most popular distributions including openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise. It is also used to build the openSUSE distribution.

Find out more, visit www.openbuildservice.org