Build service thoughts

[Jonathan Riddell]

I packaged bzr for openSUSE recently and it was suggested I send some
notes on how their build service compares to Launchpad.

One difference that surprised me is packages are built instantly as
soon as you commit.  This can probably be seen as quite a waste of
build daemon time since it will be trying to make packages even if
what you are working on isn't complete but it does remove a step from
the user (in our case quite a hassle filled step since it requires
using different tools to upload to the archive until build from branch
appears).

Build numbers automatically increment for each build which saves the
minor hassle of having to do so yourself in the changelog.

One source package is built for many distros and distro versions.
This would be nice to have in PPAs, again removing a minor hassle from
packagers of having to build and upload source packages multiple
times.

Packages are stored with packaging only and source in a tar file.
This simplifies the problem compared to our UDD process of having full
source branches in revision control.  Given the hassle full source
branches seem to make for UDD (still > 500 import failures, quilt on
top to bzr double revision control, notable new workflows for
packagers, definitive source RCS is upstream and ours don't generally
match) doing packaging only branches would seem to me to have been an
easy win but too late to change now.

They have OSC, a command line tool for checkout and commit (similar to
subversion in its revision control functions so much more limited than
bzr there).  It also allows for easy searching of packages, checkouts
include personal archives, and it submits merge requests which could
be done as bzr plugins with support from Launchpad.

They have external users, notably the Linux Foundation which means
MeeGo is closely aligned to SUSE.  Maybe if Launchpad had been easier
for external users to set up MeeGo would be aligned to Ubuntu?

I found the web interface generally fiddly to find my way around and
it doesn't seem to offer much help.  Launchpad feels more logical to
me and easier to find help but maybe that's because I use it every
day.

Jonathan