THE BUILDER

One reason Novell created the community-based openSUSE project was to invite contributions from independent developers. To highlight this emphasis on outside help, Novell also unveiled a new online service that automatically builds binary packages from source code. The openSUSE Build Service initially focused on building packages for the SUSE variants – openSUSE, SLES, and SLED – but the tool was later extended to support packages for other major distributions, such as Red Hat, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian, and Ubuntu.
The openSUSE Build Service, which builds packages for the i586, x86_64, and PowerPC platforms, also tracks changes to dependencies and rebuilds packages automatically to ensure that all the pieces fit together. A developer who makes a change to the project source code just needs to configure the appropriate build specifications, and the Build Service automatically generates new binary packages for all the major Linux distributions. Packages created by the Build Service then become available to Internet users. The system is equipped with a powerful software search mechanism and a redirector infrastructure, which automatically redirects users to efficient mirror servers. YaST and other software management systems can add the project directories as installation sources.