[arch-general] resurrecting srcpac

[Jason Chu]

On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Michael Klier <chi at chimeric.de> wrote:
> Hi Archers,
>
> in the past weeks there was a little discussion in the forums about the
> purpose of ABS vs. AUR and when to use which of both tools. Srcpac was
> mentioned as being the right tool to install customized packages from the
> already existing PKGBUILDs in the ABS tree. However, srcpac didn't work since
> abs.conf moved and other minor things that changed (makepkg doesn't like to be
> used by root etc.).
>
> I took to opportunity to fetch the srcpac git repo and get it working again,
> because I think it makes a good addition to ABS + pacman.
>
> Instead of sending a bunch of patches I've setup a public git repo where you
> can fetch it and give it a testrun if you like (I can send patches too if
> required):
>
>    http://dev.chimeric.de/git/srcpac.git
>
> I've also changed a couple of things. These are merely suggestions, which are
> of course disputable ;).
>
> I completely dropped the srcpac.conf in favour of another approach.  srcpac
> now looks for config files in /etc/srcpac.d/<pkgname>. You have one config
> file per package. These files contain only sed expressions (they're just
> simple sed script files) and have to be named exactly like the corresponding
> folder (package) in the ABS tree ie. "python-doc", or "most". IMHO this is
> much more clear (KISS if you like) than having one config file containing
> stuff like "pythonXdoc=('#sedexpr#' '#sedexpr#')" which gets really messy when
> you change lots of things.
>
> Another possibility would be to keep the modified PKGBUILDs in
> /var/srcpac/<repo>/<pkgname>/PKBUILD and completely drop sed, though I think
> the sed approach requires less work.
>
> Because makepkg doesn't like to be run as root there were also some
> implications for building packages. To resolve them I decided to use a new
> user named srcpac and a dedicated build directory /var/srcpac in which the
> packages are build instead of building directly in the ABS tree. srcpac will
> drop privileges for the build process to this user.
>
> I also had to introduce a little perl dependency :( (just a oneliner) to be
> able to sanitize packages names from urls. The bash expression which was
> originally used didn't work anymore and the suggested fix in FS#8434 worked
> only partly and not for all packages. However, I failed to get the thing right
> in sed, thus the perl oneliner. If someone has an idea I'd greatly appreciate
> it (see get_pkgname()) (examples of packages which fail with the fix suggested
> in the bug report, because they're versioning scheme is a little different,
> are feh and most).
>
> Instead of using makepkg -i to install the newly build packages on the fly,
> srcpac uses pacman -U now, this way it's now possible to specify a different
> target root directory when build packages from source (this was marked as
> missing feature).
>
> From the test I've run up to now everything _seems_ to work as expected, but
> it would'nt harm if someone else who's interested in this could give it a try
> :).
>
> If you plan to try it you have to do the following things before running it (I
> can provide a PKGBUILD if needed):
>    - add a new user 'srcpac'
>    - create /var/srcpac and grand permissions for srcpac
>
> That's it, what do you think about it? I am open for suggestions in any
> direction (+thx for reading this rather lenghty mail ;)).
>
> Best Regards + TIA for any feedback,
>    Michael
>
> PS.: The original srcpac.conf is still in the repo, and I haven't touched the
> manpage in advance.
>
> --
> Michael Klier
>
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>

Hot!

I was hoping someone would do this.  I originally wrote srcpac as an
example of how such a thing could be done.  Then people actually
started using it!

I will do my best to look at your patches tonight.  I'll even put a
reminder in my phone.  I'll get back to you tomorrow about it.

Jason