Truthiness Happens

Truthiness Happens

Yesterday, I had a surprising chat with some of the openSuSE guys. After making some introductions to some of the people there, zonker pulled me aside to demo something they've been working on. I'm sure it's pretty old news by now, but up until now, I've never heard much at all about the new package manager they have in SuSE. Of course the demo didn't work, but it had something to do with internet issues at the booth, so hopefully I'll be able to drag something out of him today. What's important though, is that apparently Zypper, the package manager uses the same repository format as yum. They are deliberately trying to keep it as compatible as possible.

This led way to a conversation about areas that Fedora and openSuSE can collaborate on. The impression I got is that they are realizing the value of community as part of the development process. For starters, it seems that if there is any collaboration, we will probably see a wide number of open standards coming out of this, such as a common set of packaging guidelines for RPMs, as well as some kind of repository format.

There was also some comments about their planned involvement with Smolt in the future. Although they are currently busy with their upcoming release, they are planning on integrating smolt into their platform in the future.

The real question is though, will openSuSE become a real community distribution? There was talk about being able to contribute to the upstream Smolt. But can we convince them to sign up to work on Fedora Hosted projects? Will they be willing to actually contribute? It will be interesting to find out.