The openSUSE team has announced the release of openSUSE Build Service 1.0. The Build Service is based on Novell's internal, proprietary AutoBuild service, which had been the tool it used for building SUSE Linux. The company has been working toward the Build Service's 1.0 milestone for the past 18 months, after announcing the effort in January 2007.

The latest openSUSE Build Service offers a streamlined package search with the ability to let contributors submit package changes against the working copy, so that the official packaging team can take note and implement the changes.

The openSUSE Build Service allows developers to create and maintain packages for openSUSE and many other Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. With the 1.0 release, the openSUSE Build Service expands its scope to building the entire openSUSE release, and provides everyone with the same access and transparent interface to work on the openSUSE distribution.

Features in Build Service 1.0 include

· Streamlined package search for finding a package's working copy as maintained by the official packager or packaging team. Changes can be submitted against the working copy.
· Notifications, in which a submission handling and notification system has been put in place. Merges of changes can be made to a project.
· Stronger quality assurance, in which assurance happens before contributions are merged.
· Improved branch handling.
· Better source handling.

"The openSUSE Build Service enables independent software vendors, like Open-Xchange, to more easily and effectively embrace Linux since building and packaging applications for any distribution becomes a one-time effort," says Juergen Geck, chief technology officer at Open-Xchange. "Now, we can configure a package once, reproduce it and test automatically. Using openSUSE helps to create fully tested, ready to run builds for all relevant Linux platforms automatically."

More about the release of openSUSE Build Service 1.0 can be read here.