On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 6:59 AM, Daniel-Constantin Mierla <miconda(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'm fairly familiar opensuse build service, overall a great service, I do recommend it but I would have a few comments based on lessons i learned about 6 months ago: - there were a couple occasions over a 8 month period where i waited days for results. But most times, build times ranged from 6 hours to 10 minutes for fairly large project. - The binary repository were only built once each night, so even though build finished you couldn't install via yum/yast/apt-get until next day. I solved this by automating the download of binaries via a script - you still need a machine to automate VCS -> tarring - > uploading to build service - > optional:downloading. Luckily everything can be automated with the "osc" client. - there really is no need to build RHEL if you already have equivalent CentOS. - if you run into a build issue you cannot reproduce locally, and you're 99% sure it's with the build service. You may have to resort to building a private OBS system to reproduce the issue. I once had java compiler crashing during a build only on centos 5 64bit. centos 32 bit and fedora were fine. There was only so much I or OBS staff could do. http://old.nabble.com/OpenJDK-crash-only-on-CentOS-5---64bit-td30203623.html - do not use osc branching to create separate copies to build older releases. You get conflicts on tarballs! it's really just meant for person making tweaks to the spec/project files i guess. limited use. Instead make a full copy - there are a lot of features on the service, takes some digging but be prepared to spend some time figuring it out - If you're mainly looking for just centos/fedora builds and have a decent build machine available, I found "mock" is a better way to go instead of OBS. What are some of the details around "taking over the builds"?