Our team blog this week is written by Stephan ‘coolo’ Kulow and he talks about work in the team done on the Open Build Service.
Search
For years one of the biggest complaint about the webUI was that it is impossible to find packages. The search ability has been part of the interface from the beginning, but with over 200.000 packages being build today it is crucial to get the right package.
Where is my kernel?
Especially for developers new to openSUSE and the build service it is common to have to search for the package to fix for a specific bug. So you find yourself looking for kernel in the webUI and you are prompted with tons of results that are displayed in a rather random order and the notion that your search resulted in more than 200 hits and is basically invalid. Huh? home:foobar:latest-experiments:kernel is surely not the openSUSE kernel to fix, but then what is?
Now if you ask google about “kernel site:build.opensuse.org” you get closer to the problem at hand: “About 16,800 results” – that is a lot to pick the first 20 results to display from. The OBS webUI tried to find a good pick with an algorithm that might have been clever when build.opensuse.org had 100 projects. Today, it can only be called old and useless.