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Guidelines for package building/contributions?
Time4Tea - about 4 years ago -
Hi, I am interested in lending a hand with some package building/fixing for Parabola. I saw some of the recent e-mails on the dev mailing list that mentioned resources for package maintenance are a bit scarce right now. I've created a few bug reports recently and I would be willing to 'muck in' and help repairing/rebuilding packages that I am able to fix myself, especially for the systems I use which are perhaps a bit less common (OpenRC, armv7 Chromebook). I'm not a professional system administrator (in fact, a mechanical engineer), but I have some basic skills in Linux, shell scripting, compiling and building software. I'm not saying I would be able to contribute X hours or Y packages per week or anything like that, just muck in where I can on the issues I run into myself.
For example, for this issue I raised about a week ago, it looks like libvirt-python just needs to be rebuilt with the newer version of Python (3.8), which I would think I could probably do myself.
So, are there are any guidelines for building packages for Parabola and submitting them for inclusion in the repositories? Would packages have to be built in a 'clean' VM environment, or anything like that? How can I get involved?
I really like the Parabola distro and I would like to help if I can, to fix issues and help make it a viable option for other users.
Replies (3)
RE: Guidelines for package building/contributions? - theova - about 4 years ago -
Hi Time4Tea,
Nice to hear that! I contribute some PKGBUILD from time to time, but I am not an official maintainer.
Time4Tea wrote:
So, are there are any guidelines for building packages for Parabola and submitting them for inclusion in the repositories?
Yes. For the technical "How to build packages?", see package maintainer guide on the wiki.
To get started with contributing, see also How to contribute to Parabola's Repositories on the wiki.
In short: Build it on all three architectures and test it with your computer. If everything is fine, submit the patch/PKGBUILD to the mailing list.
Would packages have to be built in a 'clean' VM environment, or anything like that?
That's probably the best thing. See the section chroot in the package maintainer guide.
How can I get involved?
Be around, submit patches or ask your questions in this forum, on the dev mailing list or at irc.
I hope, this answer helps. If not, feel free to ask more questions :-)
RE: Guidelines for package building/contributions? - bill-auger - about 4 years ago -
building the packages with libretools is pretty important - the
main reason is that the network is disabled at build time; so
that some python, java, or golang programs to not sneak in code
from github after the sources are prepared - anything changes to
the sources after the prepare() function has run will not be
present in the source-ball
RE: Guidelines for package building/contributions? - Time4Tea - about 4 years ago -
Ok, thanks for the advice on this. I will try to submit patches where possible (although most of the packages I am having issues with atm seem to be Arch-maintained).