Recently I switched from Mandriva to OpenSUSE. Not that I was unhappy about Mandriva, not at all, it is with pain that I have to leave. The problem I had was that I’m a developer and while the Mandriva developers were busy wrapping up there Spring edition, I just had to live with older packages for KDE, while kdepim was moving rapidly with new dependencies on Qt and kdelibs. Don’t worry, I’ll be back Mandriva.

Anyhow, Mandriva did not ship Mailody at all, but that was fixed just after I installed it, and after install OpenSUSE I noticed that the Mailody version shipped did not include the patch which fixes tagging of messages. And as everyone told me they have a build service, I decided this afternoon to give it a shot.

And it is awesome. In no-time I’ve setup a personal repository and uploaded the source tarball, two patches and a spec file. After uploading the spec file, the build kicked in automatically and almost immediately. The build log can be followed real-time, so I could immediately see it did not like one of the patch files. I needed a couple of tries to get it right. The help in #opensuse-buildservice was to the point and accurate too.

A few minutes later I had the packages I wanted build successfully. Yay. It is a very straight forward system and if you have packaged stuff before, you understand it very easily. One unclear point was the ‘file upload’ part. You have a pull down that tells you ‘source’ or ‘patch’. It was not clear to me that I should also upload the spec file there. Also, the first time you completed the build, you do not know where your personal repositories are, because that’s only displayed one level up, instead of on the package page itself. Details.

This evening Stephan Binner gave me the right to alter the Community version of Mailody (he made me maintainer and laught), and gave me some final hints. So the distributed version of Mailody is also updated. I think the build service is a great feature, and everyone can use it. Even to build packages for other distros than OpenSUSE. Awesome.