Introduction to OBS build system
David Greaves has posted a high-level overview of the features that OBS provides for developers. It gives both a local build environment (Scratchbox) and a remote build service (auto-builder). He introduces the piece while outlining some of the reasons why both Maemo and MeeGo developers should be interested in it - both for their own code and any resources they may wish to share with others: In an open world we have more interactions... and as students of networks know: increased connectivity brings increased complexity as well as increased benefits. So this is an initial proposal for the organisation of OBS build projects and packages to support a QA process into an app-store / Extras or garage-like environment. I'll introduce some basic OBS concepts and then describe how this might work. I would like this to raise awareness of some potential complexities that we may face and get some thoughts on how to deal with them. Oh, and this is about both Maemo and MeeGo. He also outlines how private repositories for developers could feed into a community testing pool - and then an end-user repository of "Extras".
OBS and Fremantle Extras: huge success, but help needed
Following on from his earlier articles, David Greaves describes how the OBS configuration of Fremantle has reached a major milestone: building many packages from Extras. He says, as you may know I recently volunteered to setup a community OBS in my "spare time" (hah, right!). This is a progress report because I've reached a significant milestone... the following 193 applications have been built from 'Extras' most on both ARM and X86. Many packages have been built, but he's eagerly looking for people interested in build systems to iron out the environment issues; and work on problems in individual packages which prevent them being easily rebuilt outside of Scratchbox.
Getting Qt 4.6 apps (from PR1.2 or Nokia Qt SDK) working on PR1.1
Timur Kristóf has outlined a process for running Qt 4.6 applications on PR1.1. As many of you already know, the current firmware for the Nokia N900 (known as PR 1.1) has some controversies regarding the Qt toolkit. [...] So, basically, all we need to get stuff working is libqt4-* version 4.6.2, and what a surprise, it is possible to install it via the SDK repository. The steps are fairly straightforward, although it does require exposing yourself to the SDK repository, which contains several packages which can easily drop users into a reboot loop. Users not adventurous enough to use Extras-devel are advised to wait until PR1.2 is released officially before attempting to install bits and pieces of it from the SDK.