PKGBUILD for beginners | Steven Lynn’s Blog

Preface back to the basics The basic PKGBUILD make install put something unexecutable put the icon how about sed git + build

Preface

at any time, your can pause the makepkg, and see the result in the src/ folder located beside the PKGBUILD.

back to the basics

what is “install”?

install means you put something, binary, .so, LICENSE, png, desktop files or something else into your computer. But we all forget things, so we need someone help us remember these things, which called package manager.

The basic PKGBUILD

suppose you just want put a pre-compiled binary into your /usr/bin/ , but you are afraid of forgetting it.

the intuitive way is just

PRO: simple

CON: after some time: what’s this? why is it here? can I remove it?

the PKGBUILD way:

the important thing is “package”

install is a shortcut to “move” things and make directory as well as set permission.

the convension install -Dm755

-D means create all leading components of DEST except the last, or all components of

-m means --mode

-t means put into a folder, keep its name

so it do

mkdir -p all the needed folder

chmod the binary

mv the binary into the folder.

the $pkgdir is just a pkg folder in the same folder with your PKGBUILD, it recorded all your file’s position.

make install

some legacy instruction will tell us to cargo install , but it’s not good. So let’s write a PKGBUILD to let package manager help us do this!

suppose we don’t know how to set the path of binary, so just take the default configuration.

this will generate the binary in the $srcdir folder.

then

A more detailed manual can be found here

Rust package guidelines

This document covers standards and guidelines on writing PKGBUILDs for software written in Rust. When packaging Rust projects, the package name should almost always be the same as the name of the generated binary. Note that it does not make any sense to package library crates, so only crates with bins will be packaged.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rust_package_guidelines

put something unexecutable

for example, we need to put desktop file into position.

644 vs 755, it doesn’t have the +x .

put the icon

how about sed

for example, we want to set the environment before launch binary.

then we can change the entrance.

sed -i means inplace

explain the regex:

s means substitute

| means use | as split, so we don’t need to \/ . also see below 🤣

Leaning toothpick syndrome - Wikipedia

In computer programming, leaning toothpick syndrome ( LTS) is the situation in which a quoted expression becomes unreadable because it contains a large number of escape characters, usually backslashes ("\"), to avoid delimiter collision. The official Perl documentation introduced the term to wider usage; there, the phrase is used to describe regular expressions that match Unix-style paths, in which the elements are separated by slashes /.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_toothpick_syndrome

^ means line begin, .* means greedy match. So we match a whole line with Exec at the beginning

git + build

pkgbuild 更新 bin 包时最好把 pkgver 写 binary 名字里，那样 updpkgsum 时不会直接读老的包==

然后把 $pkgrel 也写在包里，这样同 tag 升级也没影响

然后 CARCH 可以用来区分多架构的包，不会重名覆盖，checksum 直接挂（笑死