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CONTRIBUTING.md

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Contributing to Mere Linux

Package Development

What should I know before I start?

Mere Linux uses pacman as its package manager, with some customizations. Each package has its own directory under the packages directory, which contains at least a PKGBUILD file.

Some PKGBUILD files may create multiple, related packages, called 'split packages'. A typical example would be a package that provides a run-time library and a corresponding -dev package that provides library headers, development documentation, static libraries, or other components required for using the library at build-time.

While packages can be built using only the makepkg utility provided with the pacman-build package, Mere's build utilities are designed around building inside a Docker container. This helps achieve isolation and an easily repeatable environment when building a package, resulting in fewer build issues. This also has the advantage of detaching a build host system from the build requirements. For example, it is easy to create a Mere package on a MacOS system running Docker Desktop by simply using the same build utilities.

Creating a New Package

  1. Create a new directory under packages
  2. Copy template.PKGBUILD to packages/<newpkg>/PKGBUILD.
  3. Edit the new PKGBUILD file, adjusting the pkgname, pkgver, pkgdesc, url and license variables. You may also need to adjust the sources variable to match the full url of your source archive, and makedepends if your package has additional build-time dependencies.
  4. Adjust the build and package functions as necessary to correctly compile and install the package contents. (For examples of more advanced configurations, see the musl or s6 PKGBUILD files.)
  5. Run ./buildpkg.sh packages/<newpkg> gen. This will launch a docker container and update the ChangeLog file with a description of the changes based on short input, and then download the sources and add sha256 hash sums of each source to the sha256sums bash array in the PKGBUILD file.
  6. Run ./buildpkg.sh packages/<newpkg> to launch the build inside a Docker container. This will create a temporary directory in your system's tmpdir location, copy the contents of packages/<newpkg> to it and mount it as the working directory inside the container. When the build is complete, or if it exits with an error, the name of the temporary directory will be displayed and you can inspect its contents. If you prefer to develop inside the container interactively, you can run ./buildpkg.sh packages/<newpkg> sh instead. You will land at a shell prompt inside the build environment container, in the same working directory. To then run all the commands that would have been run automatically, run build-in-docker.