So far, rinigus has nicely covered how OBS is useful for managing complex apps with many deps, and r0kk3rz has covered how OBS is used by other parts of our community such as nemo.
Im sure you know the use cases already, but I just want to ensure that whatever you come up with as a replacement also meets the needs of porters.
- OBS allows us to easily manage development and release builds and promote from one to the other
- OBS allows us to easily maintain releases for different sailfish versions, and allows users to use this to upgrade between releases
- OBS provides a common location to host releases. I cannot stress enough that I would not want the hassle of maintaining my own server space for the release repositories. All ports get to share the same format URL and this provides consistency across the platform. As you are concerned about the legal issues of hosting on OBS, im intrigued how this will be managed in the future.
- OBS provides the community common: and native-common: repos. Will the community continue to be able to feed into these repositories that are common across ports?
- OBS allows us to quickly update and rebuild mw libraries (usually in the quick but hackish _service edit), and have dependant packages rebuilt automatically. This makes it pretty easy to trigger mass rebuilds. I wouldnt want to do this locally … im sure some porters have server setups, but im running on a 6th gen core i5 laptop, and remote builds are a dream!
Non-porter related:
6. While the SDK is great for most application development, it is not so great for building support/mw libraries. For example, Amazfish uses several KDE libraries which are built on OBS.
I hope that whatever solutions you look into will cover all these requirements for a seamless-as-possible transition.