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tar_scm (OBS source service) Build Status

This is the git repository for openSUSE:Tools/obs-service-tar_scm, which provides several source services for the Open Build Service which all assist with packaging source code from SCM (source code management) repositories into tarballs. The authoritative source is https://github.com/openSUSE/obs-service-tar_scm.

Services

tar_scm (deprecated)

tar_scm is the legacy source service used to create a source tarball from one of the supported SCM (source code management) tools: git, hg, svn, and bzr.

tar_scm supports many options, e.g. it can adjust resulting tarball parameters, include or exclude particular files when creating the tarball, or generate an rpm changelog from the SCM commit log. For the full list of options please see tar_scm.service.in.

Apart from various SCM like git, hg, bzr or svn, it additionally supports --url option that allows you to specify URL of the upstream tarball to be downloaded.

tar_scm can be used in combination with other services like download_files, recompress or set_version e.g. within the GIT integration workflow.

tar_scm is deprecated in favour of obs_scm.

obs_scm

obs_scm is similar in concept to tar_scm, but instead of directly generating tarballs, it instead uses the new obscpio archive format (see below) as an intermediate space-efficient format in which to store the sources.

It is recommended to use obs_scm in favour to tar_scm, because it provides the following advantages:

  1. When you osc checkout, you'll also get a local checkout directory within the project directory, inside which you can develop as usual and test your changes with local builds, even without having to commit or push your changes anywhere.

  2. It helps to save a lot of disk space on the server side, especially when used in continuous integration (e.g. nightly builds and builds of pull requests).

The usual source tarballs can be regenerated from this at build-time using the tar and recompress source services, so no changes to .spec files are required when switching to obs_scm and obscpio.

Having said that, it may be more efficient to drop the build-time usage of recompress, since at build-time rpmbuild would decompress the same file soon after compressing it. In this case, only the tar source service would be used to reconstruct an uncompressed tarball to be consumed by the .spec file. However this has the side-effect that the resulting .src.rpm will contain an uncompressed tarball too. This is not necessarily a problem because .src.rpm files are compressed anyway, and in fact it may even be more efficient to avoid double compression (i.e. the sources within the .src.rpm, and the .src.rpm itself both being compressed). But this depends very much on the combination of compression formats used for compression of the sources, and for compression of the .src.rpm. Therefore the decision whether to use recompress will depend on what format is desired within the resulting .src.rpm, and on the types of compression being used for both the tarball and by rpmbuild for constructing the source rpms.

obs_scm additionally generates a file named <package>.obsinfo which includes useful information from your SCM system, such as the name, version number, mtime, and commit SHA1. This data is then used by the tar service (see below) to reconstruct a tarball for use by rpmbuild at build-time, and also by the set_version source service in order to set the version in build description files such as .spec or .dsc files.

tar

The tar source service creates a tarball out of a .obscpio archive and a corresponding .obsinfo file which contains metadata about it. Typically this service is run at build-time, e.g.

<service name="tar" mode="buildtime"/>

since storing the .tar file in OBS would duplicate the source data in the .obscpio and defeat the point of using .obscpio in the first place, which is to save space on the OBS server.

See http://openbuildservice.org/2016/04/08/new_git_in_27/ for an example combining usage of the obs_scm and tar source services.

snapcraft

The snapcraft source service can be used to fetch sources before building a snappy app (a.k.a. snap).

It parses a snapcraft.yaml file, looking for any parts in the parts section which have source-type set to one of the supported SCMs. For each one it will fetch the sources via the SCM from the upstream repository, and build a tarball from it.

Finally it will write a new version of snapcraft.yaml which has the source value rewritten from the original URL, to the name of the part, which is also the name of the newly created local file. This allows the snap to be built purely from local files.

appimage

The appimage source service can be used to fetch sources before building an AppImage. It parses an appimage.yml file, looks for an optional build section at the top-level, and for any sub-key named after a supported SCM, it will treat the corresponding value as a URL, fetch the sources via the SCM from the upstream repository, and build a tarball from it. You can find example appimage.yml files under the tests/fixtures/ subdirectory.

gbp

The obs_gbp service can be used to create Debian source artefacts (.dsc, .orig.tar.gz and if non-native .debian.tar.gz or .diff.gz) from Git repositories, following the very popular git-buildpackage workflow. Requires git-buildpackage to be installed.

Archive Formats

tar

The standard tar archive format is used as output format by the tar and tar_scm source services.

obscpio

obscpio archives are cpio archives in newc format. Using these allows the OBS Delta Store to store changes server-side in a space-efficient incremental way, independently of your chosen SCM. Then at build-time, the tar source service converts a file from this format into a regular .tar for use by rpmbuild. This is described in more detail in this blog post:

Installation

The files in this top-level directory need to be installed using the following:

make install

User documentation

There isn't yet any comprehensive user documentation (see issue #238), but in the meantime, in addition to the information in this README, the following resources may be helpful:

Test suite

See the TESTING.md file.

Contributions

See the CONTRIBUTING.md file.