Getting a package from openSUSE to SLE

By Timo Jyrinki

I was looking forward to updating a package (enchant) with a backported patch from upstream and wanted it to be included in both SLE offerings and openSUSE. I’m used to working within the community from the past, so even though I’m a SUSE employee I wanted to contribute without using anything internal.

I filed a bug and did a request to first get the patch into Tumbleweed via GNOME:Factory. That was easy, but then I looked on how to get the same patch into the stable releases. Since openSUSE and SUSE are now coming closer, I found documentationa about the Jump and mailing lists described some documents for example that there either is or is going to be a new redirector service, and suggestion was to target openSUSE:Jump:15.2 at one point.

Eventually I found out that since 15.3 is when SLE & openSUSE really closes the leap gap, Jump is already history and currently the best target is to use openSUSE:Leap:15.3. I was actually told by someone that it wouldn’t work, but… it did!

In practice my Leap request (I really submitted it to openSUSE:Leap:15.3!) was automatically detected to be about a package that openSUSE inherits from SLE, so the target was switched to SLE 15-SP2 on the fly. Secondly, after some time a person managing these kind of requests copied over my public request to be usable inside SLE process, and then an official SLE 15-SP2 update request was created automatically. It passed QA in the beginning of January, and was made available to 15-SP2 users! Luckily 15-SP3 has no deviation for this package from 15-SP2, so it’s automatically also there, and that means openSUSE Leap 15.3 is going to have the patched package automatically as well.

Finally, also without my manual intervention there was a request to get it to Leap 15.2 as well, finalizing fixing all relevant releases (15.1 is not affected by the bug).

All in all, even though it feels the documentation is a bit lacking and there could be more feedback or clearer visibility on a higher level, the functionality of the process was really good. Now that I know a bit more, I can try to improve the wiki a bit.