As the current Storeman maintainer, I would like to add another point to the list @piggz started, why the SailfishOS-OBS is crucial and indispensable:
- Storeman as the only maintained OpenRepos client app, depends on being built and distributed by the SailfishOS-OBS.
In detail: The Storeman Installer for initially deploying Storeman on a SailfishOS device and also Storeman’s self-updating mechanism relies on the SailfishOS-OBS for providing SailfishOS release version specific builds in order to support a wide range of SailfishOS releases. Hence the SailfishOS-OBS is crucial and indispensable for building and distributing Storeman. Because Storeman is the only maintained OpenRepos client app for long (many years), without it SailfishOS would lack a client app for downloading, installing and managing RPMs and repositories at OpenRepos.
Summary / TL;DR
Without the SailfishOS-OBS, both community app stores will be obsoleted and cease to work: SailfishOS-Chum, because it directly utilises the SailfishOS-OBS for building and distributing the software it contains (point 1), and OpenRepos, because its only client app Storeman relies on being built and distributed by the SailfishOS-OBS (point 3).
Furthermore, most community ports of SailfishOS depend on the SailfishOS-OBS for their hardware adaptation (point 2). Switching off the SailfishOS-OBS means to discard more than 100 device ports (and additional ones in the pipeline)!
- Additional perspectives
- Jolla should consider which effects shutting down the Jolla internal OBS would have (and using the SailfishOS-SDK instead for building SailfishOS and its core apps): It is the same for the community!
- This has been discussed in depth almost two years ago: A proper alternative to the SailfishOS-OBS needs to provide the mass-building for different SailfishOS releases, dependency management (e.g., for complex projects as Pure Maps) and distribution (of the built RPMs) capabilities to the same extent as the SailfishOS-OBS.
References: - These and some additional points have been brought up at the Community meeting on IRC 12th May 2022 in the general discussion, from 07:45 to 08:15.
I hope that depicting the consequences of shutting down the SailfishOS-OBS is helpful to keep it alive: It has become a crucial piece of the infrastructure for SailfishOS apps and ports over the years.