The AlmaLinux OS Foundation published ALBS; a new build system that makes it easy for community members to build packages and images. Building packages by the community is a fundamental part of growing and ensuring a healthy enterprise Linux ecosystem.
AlmaLinux is open-source, free, and community-owned
AlmaLinux is a fully open-source, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution that is supported and governed by a growing list of members helping to improve each version. Starting from this, AlmaLinux engineering team started work long ago to make sure that the build system is also transparent and open for use by any organization that is interested in building a better Linux distribution!
Today, AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced ALBS: AlmaLinux Build System. The read-only access to the new build system is available at build.almalinux.org. The foundation also released the source for ALBS under the GPLv3 license. With the new build system, the community members are now able to build packages for AlmaLinux OS 8.6 as well as AlmaLinux OS 9.0 for all platforms based on x86_64, Arm aarch64, PowerPC ppc64le & s90x architectures.
AlmaLinux Build System adds deeper transparency to the build processes by releasing anonymous, read-only access to the build system. With the new ALBS, anyone can view what packages are being built, when a specific package was built, when a package build fails, and all of the logs related to each package’s build process.
AlmaLinux team future roadmap
The AlmaLinux development team has begun producing updates that give fully functional OVAL files for use by OpenSCAP and any other security software, in addition to the initial read-only access. The OVAL files contain all of the errata information, as well as mitigation suggestions and module support. More information on OVAL Streams and files can be accessed on AlmaLinux Wiki page.
AlmaLinux community is working hard to develop the best free CentOS alternative, enterprise Linux distribution. The roadmap shows in the near future more features are coming.
By the end of July, the team plans to:
- Introduce an RBAC system to allow and authorize access to package maintainers and contributors from various organizations.
- Add SBOM support for builds by integrating with CodeNotary ensuring package provenance and constitution are well documented and transparent.
AlmaLinux team’s future plans are:
- Implement Organization/SIG namespaces within the build system
- Add COPR support
- Automate VM & container image building and publishing.
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation aims to make it simple for anybody to build packages and images for the Enterprise Linux ecosystem for any organization interested in doing so.