OBS Mailing List Summary, Week 42

by Nathan Cutler posted on 18th Oct 2013

Here is a summary of activity on the opensuse-buildservice mailing list during week 42:

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Ladislav Slezak announced his successful Hack Week project designed to speed up appliance builds in the Build Service by reducing the number of packages that are downloaded.

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Fadi Kelajian asked about upgrading an existing OBS Server instance from 2.3 to 2.4 – he would like to upgrade without losing existing data (projects, packages). Adrian advised him to read https://github.com/openSUSE/open-build-service/blob/master/dist/README.UPDATERS and, of course, take a backup first.

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Ruediger Meier expressed displeasure over multiple requests like https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/188119 to remove “deleted” repositories from projects. These requests got auto-accepted even before he returned from vacation.

  • Jan Engelhardt noted that certain types of requests are not delivered via email: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739335
  • Coolo responded that it’s time to implement that email notification mechanism.
  • Adrian explained that, in this case, a “deleted” repository is one that got moved somewhere else. Such a configuration will never build until the path list of the “deleted” repository is fixed.

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Andreas Baumann asked a question regarding a project failing to link to the Fedora_17 build target, to which Kanstantsin Shautsou noted that, since Fedora 17 is EOL, the problem will probably never get fixed.

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Darin Perusich complained about a problem where, after doing a local build, he couldn’t open a new Konsole window. He traced this to a permissions issue, where running obs build openSUSE_12.3 caused the mount options of devpts to change. Marcus Meissner replied that, last week, he released a new build package that fixes the permissions for 12.2 and 12.3.

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Boris Manojlovic complained that the OBS web UI is sluggish on slower links. He posted a Firebug analysis on: http://paste.opensuse.org/29484148 As ways to address the problem, he suggested: JavaScript “minification”, CSS “minification”, gzip/deflate encoding/content type, and Etag support.

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Brian K. White expressed amazement that the xz package “requires” itself to build. This is not an explicit BuildRequires, but just the fact that the build process assumes tar will handle a .tar.xz file.

  • Ruediger Meier noted that there are precedents for this: for example, gcc requires gcc, coreutils requires coreutils.
  • Michal Vyskocil posted a link to his Request 203465 on openSUSE Build Service: https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/203465 (which has since been accepted)
  • Adrian responded to Ruediger’s comment by saying that bootstrapping is unavoidable in the case of gcc, but should be avoided wherever possible.
  • Michal Vyskocil also noted that upstream provides tarballs compressed using other technologies than xz, like gzip and bzip2, and his request addresses the issue.

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Guillermo Amat wrote about a bug that results in a “Failed to add project or repository: unable to walk on path” error when he tries to add an additional apth to his project’s repository. Martin Koegler replied that it’s probably due to a JavaScript implementation issue in some browsers, so perhaps switching to a different browser is in order.

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Coolo posted an in-depth report about his Hack Week project, “Start the engine”, designed to fix an internal problem with the OBS web UI.

* See [http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2013-10/msg00086.html](http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2013-10/msg00086.html)

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Andreas Herrmann posted a mini-HOWTO for setting up proxy_mode with Apache Header Rewrite and .htaccess against LDAP.

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Andreas Herrmann wrote about getting an error 500 when he tried to list all projects in the web UI, after upgdating OBS 2.4 Stefan Botter responded with his analysis of a similar problem he ran into after upgrading from 2.3 to 2.4.