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the avatar of Agustin Benito Bethencourt
the avatar of Agustin Benito Bethencourt

Summary about what the openSUSE Team @ SUSE is doing

openSUSE 13.1 is about to be Released (Nov. 19th) and I would like to share what the team I am part of is doing.

I joined SUSE in June 2012, almost 18 months ago. I haven't written much about anything during this time. And it haven't been because I hadn't time, but because I haven't have enough energy. I have received though these past months several requests to write a little about what I do at SUSE, so here we go....

The openSUSE Team is a good mix of long term SUSE employees and fresh blood, youth and experience, openSUSE and other distros background, on site and remote workers, people with management or commercial/customer support experience together with integrators and developers, people coming from R&D or product focus companies together with people with a strong community profile.... a very diverse (1 Taiwanese, 2 Czechs, 1 Dutch, 1 Serbian, 4 Spaniards and 3 Germans) and talented group. We also have trainees in the team. Having students is something I like because it helps any team to develop engagement skills.

The Team has as major focus the openSUSE distribution. It is element around which the whole project circles. It is the key point that sustain everything else in openSUSE. Obviously we put effort in other actions but we try that everything we do is directly related, have its roots, in the distribution, in the software. Obviously we are not the only force in openSUSE, not even the most numerous. There are hundreds (literally) of people that participates in this collective effort.

The team have a big impact since we are dedicated full time to work on the project, we have focused our activity in limited areas and we are fairly well organized. But in terms of effort, the rest of the community has a much bigger weight than my team... fortunately :-).

Those familiar with KDE will understand what I mean if I name Blue Systems work in the project today.

From the community perspective we have focused our action in two major areas:
* The openSUSE Conference.
* openSUSE news portal (marketing).

In 2012, like it happened before, SUSE took the lead in organizing the Conference. This changed in 2013. A group of contributors led by Kostas and Stella, reputed community members, organized it, opening the door for a new model within openSUSE.

SUSE role in the organization changed. Now we support the organizers in different tasks instead of leading the organization. For me, this is a relevant success story that should serve as example for many in the future. I feel very comfortable in this new role because the efficiency of our contribution has increased significantly. Organizing an event FOR a community is different than supporting the community in organizing THEIR event, right?

In marketing my team makes a significant impact by keeping the News portal as a reference point of information about openSUSE. We focus most of our action around the openSUSE Releases. We also link the innovation brought by SUSE into openSUSE with our community. We help SUSE Teams in marketing their work when it makes sense.

These two actions leave us little time for supporting further initiatives in the news portal. We do it once in a while though, not in regular basis. The situation in this regard is not much different than other communities I know. Keeping the main news portal up and healthy requires more people than usually is available. A more collective approach is what we all want. It is not an easy goal to achieve in any case.

So we basically have concentrated our effort in three main areas:
  • What we call "the future". You will know more about it soon.
  • The openSUSE Development and Release process, that will have openSUSE 13.1 as the main result, coming in a few days (November 19th).
  • Community work. Specially around the openSUSE Conference and the news portal.

I hope this overview provides some answers to those of you interested in what I am up to lately. You can follow closely our actions through our Team blog, that has Jos Poortvliet as main editor and the whole team as authors.

This week I am participating together with other colleagues in SUSECon'13 and openSUSE Summit 2013. If you are in the Orlando Area, FL, US, consider coming. You won't regret it.
Agustin Benito Bethencourt (Toscalix) @toscalix Linkedin profile: http://linkedin.com/in/toscalix

the avatar of Sascha Peilicke
the avatar of Sascha Peilicke

OBS: Introducting the “refresh_patches” source service

As you know, RPM (and DEB and ...) package building is a repetitive process and you would want to automate it as much as possible. In the context of the Open Build Service(OBS), source services can help you with exactly that. Over the time, the OBS community has implemented a whole range of source services. … Continue reading OBS: Introducting the “refresh_patches” source service

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Libreoffice state in Gentoo and openSUSE

Lets start with the happy stuff we have in Gentoo.

Andreas (dilfridge) created the binary package for 4.1.3.2 which means we have latest upstream provided as binary for stable users. He also managed to get Patrick (bonsaikitten) to provide HW where we can build the testing tree based version too. So stay tuned the binary will soon TM arrive for testing tree.

There seem to be some issues with portage lately wrt subslots and tracking the rebuilds so if you have build collisions while emerging this just try to mess with –backtrack option and put there some value bigger than 30.

I spent some time updating the dependencies and prepped the switches for 4.2 release so we should be on good track there. But as always it would be nice to have more people in the team working on individual bumps (it is just copy from one version to another most of the time) but I can’t be everywhere and sometimes I overlook things. So if you are interested just drop by #gentoo-office irc channel and we can get you hooked. Later on the run you can became also developer as this position is suited for contributors who want to get involved more.

Now the other half about openSUSE state

Here goes the sad part. As libreoffice team moved to collabora it left openSUSE without any packager for the suite. Part of the libreoffice team responsibility was also maintaining the hunspell dicitionaries which is even worse as it impacts everybody who uses the hunspell for spellchecking (kde/gnome/…).

So we need people interested in maintaining all the stuff updated and working. Most of the tasks now are quite complex as the packages are written with compatibility for sle10 in mind. We can finally give up on that and start cleanups (which I intend to do during my free time at some point) but I could use help a lot. So if you are interested in libreoffice future on openSUSE and know how to write “bit” complex spec files just drop me a mail or ping me on irc so we can talk about it.

Some sort of plan I have with this:
1) Reduce the repositories used. As I am all alone working on this I will remove all the stable/unstable stuff and provide only :Factory repo which will be built against Factory and supported openSUSE versions (12.2/12.3/13.1). Unstable will be utilized only for testing of beta releases before next minor bump if needed (4.1.0 -> 4.2.0).
2) Cleanup all the stuff in the libreoffice package to have it maintainable with less dificulity (now it takes quite few hours just to bump from 4.1.2 to 4.1.3 which is bugfix release and that is not optiomal).
3) Probably solve the dictionaries situation for good by using only the dictionaries from libreoffice repo. Where we can say to people if they want support they just need to git commit it to libreoffice git repository. Which has nice sideefect of improving spellchecking for english and others.

the avatar of Andrew Wafaa
the avatar of Andrew Wafaa

(re)Standing for the Board

Aloha fellow Geekos! I was fortunate enough to have been elected to the Board two years ago, and as always when you have fun time flies. As such my current tenure on the Board is due to end this year. As the openSUSE project is something that I value, believe in and enjoy I would like to stand for re-election. I will not present my campaign yet but will do so as of the 18 Nov, but what I will say is this:

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Vim reading list

For years when I needed to search for something in 'vim', I would use the '/' command and type the search key. Usually this would be inefficient, because I would be typing the name of a function that was right there on the screen (sometimes I would use the mouse to copy-and-paste to save a few keystrokes, taxing my brain with yet another keyboard/mouse context switch and exacerbating my "mouse finger" syndrome). Imagine my surprise to learn that Vim has a '*' command to search for whatever word happens to be under the cursor! And then there are the 'n' and 'N' commands which search forwards and backwards, respectively, for the last search key.
Read more »

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a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

KDE:Unstable:Playground is no more (or: adjustments in KDE repositories)

As you may know, there is an ongoing effort to rearrange and adjust the openSUSE KDE repositories. In line with the previously announced deletions, and more recent adjustments, a number of changes went into the organization and layout of the KDE repositories:

  • KDE:Distro:Factory and KDE:Release:4xy will now hold the “core” KDE packages: this means the base Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications, and additional applications for a basic desktop experience. Other, non-core packages have been moved to KDE:Extra

  • “Extra” packages that qualify as non-core are now in the KDE:Extra repository. If you are a previous user of KRxy or KDF, you might want to add the relevant Extra repository

  • KDE:Unstable:Playground is no more, replaced by KDE:Unstable:Extra

In addition, the repository page on the openSUSE wiki has been updated to reflect these changes. If in doubt, take a look there.

Should you have any additional questions, feel free to hop on #opensuse-kde on Freenode, or use the opensuse-kde mailing list.

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