README.md

xbps-src overlay demo

An xbps-src wrapper that (ab)uses overlayfs to trick xbps-src into building packages from different template repositories.

This is a very rough and rudimentary implementation, someone smarter and more experienced with shell scripting than me should figure out something better. Feel free to open issues and pull requests.

Example usage

git clone https://github.com/freddylist/xbps-src-overlay-demo.git
cd xbps-src-overlay-demo/
ln -s path/to/void-packages distdir
mkdir repos && cd $_
ln -s path/to/some/srcpkgs 00-my-srcpkgs
ln -s path/to/some/more/srcpkgs 20-other-srcpkgs
# DON'T symlink void-packages/srcpkgs, it is automatically included
# because xbps-src relies on some packages from there.
cd ..
./xbps-src-wrapper pkg <package name from any linked repository>

As you might've guessed, repos are lexicographically sorted to determine their priority. void-packages/srcpkgs/ has priority over every repo symlinked in the repos/ directory. Repos with higher priority than void-packages/srcpkgs/ should be symlinked in a priority-repos/ directory.

By default, you'll find binary packages in path/to/void-packages/hostdir/binpkgs/overlay-wrapper-pkgs.

How it works

We use unshare to be able to mount an overlayfs where xbps-src expects templates to be. Alternatively we could use fuse-overlayfs, but I think it might be slower.