Why Run a Private OBS Instance?¶
One of the most frequently asked questions, even before we ever started implementing the use of OBS, is why we would run a private instance.
We’re Upstream, not the Build Service¶
The Kolab community on kolab.org and its patron Kolab Systems are upstream for the Kolab Groupware solution.
In the public OBS, the release management aspects of a 3.0 stable release versus a 3.1 development release are reflected poorly, if at all, and the projects related to the OBS projects are out of mainstream [1], and have not yet been submitted back upstream.
Update Repositories¶
Kolab Groupware requires the updates released for a certain platform to be released, as both such updates repositories may contain new packages required for Kolab, or may include new versions of software that require our packages to be rebuild against them.
3rd Party and Additional Software Repositories¶
Kolab Groupware holds a natural need for 3rd party or additional software repositories as well, for our software glues all of these pieces together. For Enterprise Linux 6, we require Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux by the Fedora Project, for Ubuntu we require packages from it’s universe software repository, and for openSUSE we require packages from a third party repository such as server:php:applications.
Repository and Build Target Configuration¶
Kolab Systems heavily relies on the expertise of its in-house packagers, all of whom very experienced with Fedora and Enterprise Linux packaging. For inclusion of the packaging work into upstream distributions, certain conditions known as Packaging Guidelines need to be met – and they need to be met across distributions.
We therefore have Enterprise Linux 6 as our current reference platform for a community Kolab Groupware installation, and need the build systems we use for Kolab Groupware in general, to reflect the Enterprise Linux build system as closely as possible.
This has proven to not always be the case for the public OBS.
Download-on-Demand, Storage and Mirroring¶
Because of the aforementioned problems, we’re almost forced to run a private OBS instance already. This introduces other problems, related to a feature called Download-on-Demand appearing to not work, and storage restrictions.
Kolab Systems maintains a full mirror of operating system release trees and their updates, additional software and 3rd party repositories for automated deployment to systems in order to be able to assure the Kolab Groupware quality, and continue development.
This mirror extends to a data volume of about 900 GB easily. This may not seem a lot of storage, but it is currently shared between a variety of services and applications, and would need to be duplicated for OBS specifically.
Kolab Systems therefore maintains a set of patches against OBS that enable it to share the data from its existing location.
Footnotes