Building a Package on Solus for Installation by eopkg from a Custom Local Repository

Introduction

The Solus build system, centered around the solbuild program, allows the building of packages in an isolated environment, via cheroot, against an image that contains packages in either the Solus unstable or stable repositories. Like all other packaging systems it uses a "recipe" for building a package in the form of package.yml. One of the nice features of the system is a script that generates a skeleton of the file from the upstream tarball link with some values prefilled (mostly accurately).

A directory is created for packaging where packaging helper scripts are cloned from a Solus GitHub repository. Within this directory a subdirectory for each package to be built is created and the tools made available to run in each package's build directory through symlinks. solbuild is run in the package's directory which will process the package's package.yml and build the package.

solbuild is run using one of several available profiles which will alter the characteristics of the resulting package. These are the main, unstable, and unstable-local profiles. The first results in a package built against the stable image, the second and third in a package built against the unstable image. The difference is that the packages of the last profile are automatically transferred to /var/lib/packages/local/ which can be used as a local repository to build packages against.

In my experimentation with Solus packaging, the goal was to simply build a package not available in the Solus repository and install it from a local .eopkg file, so I didn't bother with the unstable or unstable-local profiles. I made a directory alongside the build directory and configured it to be used as a local repository instead of /var/lib/packages/local/, which by default is only for locally built packages using the unstable profile against which other packages can be built, although it may be possible to manually place packages built with the main profile in the default unstable local repository and install them using eopkg instead of building against them. I didn't try this; instead I copied the packages written to the package's build directory by solbuild to my custom local repository and installed my build of Kile from there.

I also didn't use another component of the Solus packaging system, arcanist, a simple -- for the user or contributor -- tool to push packages and package changes to the remote development infrastructure. I also didn't bother with setting up a global Git configuration which is required for setting up arcanist. In normal use of the Solus packaging system for contributors, a Git repository is created in the package's build directory and the Git tracking is used in the remote infrastructure when submitting a package using arcanist. I did, however, set up a Git repository using a local configuration to track the changes to the packaging sources, primarily package.yml.

Prepare System

In building Kile and adding it to the local repository, I used the process described below, which is a little different from the documented process and the process presented in the YouTube tutorials on Solus packaging. The differences are focused on

• building against the main profile
• using a different local repository from the default
• using the local repository to install built packages and not to build against
• packaging for local use and not for contributing

1. Create the packager file at ~/.solus/packager

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ mkdir .solus

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ touch .solus/packager

2. Edit the packager file to look like the following.

   [Packager]
   Name=First_Name Last_Name
   Email=username@second_level_domain.tld

3. Install development component and the build system, solbuild.

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ sudo eopkg it -c system.devel solbuild

   

   Installing the Development Component and solbuild, the Solus Build System

   Components are similar to "groups" of packages in other distributions.
4. Initialize the build system, solbuild.

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ sudo solbuild init

   

   Initializing solbuild
5. Update solbuild.

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ sudo solbuild update

   • 
   • 
   • 
   • 

   Updating the Build System Image
6. Create a folder for building packages. When building a package one will create a subfolder in this directory for each package.

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ mkdir Solus-LB 

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ cd Solus-LB 

7. Clone Git repository containing Solus build scripts.

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ git clone https://dev.getsol.us/source/common.git 

8. Create symlinks to makefiles.

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB $ ln -sv common/Makefile.common .

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB $ ln -sv common/Makefile.toplevel Makefile

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB $ ln -sv common/Makefile.iso .

   

   The Contents of the Main Build Directory, In My Case ~/Solus-LB
9. Make an alias named fetchYml for "$HOME/repository/common/Scripts/yauto.py" in ~/.bashrc. Although the documentation uses the ~/repository name for the top level package building directory, we are using ~/Solus-LB, so the alias will be to "$HOME/Solus-LB/common/Scripts/yauto.py"
   

   alias fetchYml="$HOME/Solus-LB/common/Scripts/yauto.py"

Prepare to Package Kile

1. Make a directory for packaging Kile inside the main packaging directory.

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB $ mkdir kile

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB $ cd kile

2. Configure git local.

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB/kile $ git config --local user.name "My Name"

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB/kile $ git config --local user.email "username@second_level_domain.tld"

3. Make the Makefile available for the current package build.

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB/kile $ echo "include ../Makefile.common" > Makefile

4. Update the build system image, solbuild.

   brook@g5-solus ~ $ sudo solbuild update

5. Fetch the Kile source tarball and generate the package.yml skeleton file.

   brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB/kile $ fetchYml https://github.com/KDE/kile/archive/v3.0b3.tar.gz

   • 
   • 

   Fetching the Source Tarball and Generating the package.ypkg

   The fetchYml alias to one of Solus's helper scripts configured previously conveniently downloads the source into the Kile build directory and generates a skeleton of package.ypkg in one step.
6. Edit the package.yml file as appropriate to build the package. In the following section I describe the process of adding necessary components of the file to build Kile. And the section after that I describe the actual build commands which completed successfully after four attempts due to errors, also described in that section.

Generate .ypkg

The most difficult aspect of preparing the package.yml is in having the complete and correct set of build dependencies, and to a lesser extent the runtime dependencies. In the case of packaging Kile the dependencies are not as clear cut as the examples in the tutorial videos published on YouTube by the lead developer. In the videos many of the examples were either Solus projects or simple software in terms of building and developers spelled out dependencies.

It was helpful to use

sudo eopkg info package-name

to find the dependencies of a package once a certain package was determined to be relevant. The epcsearch.py was also useful in finding some useful information for populating dependencies in the package.yml -- used, for example, as follows from the package's build directory:

../common/Scripts/epcsearch.py Qt5Widgets

. For packaging Kile the biggest clue, by far, as to the needed dependencies was the CMakeLists.txt file in the Kile GitHub repository, more so than the repository's README or similar documentation which are used in the tutorial examples as sources of dependency information. This file includes the block:

find_package(Qt5 5.6 CONFIG REQUIRED
	Core
	DBus
	Widgets
	Script
	Test
)

find_package(KF5 5.31 REQUIRED COMPONENTS
	Config
	CoreAddons
	Crash
	DBusAddons
	DocTools
	GuiAddons
	I18n
	IconThemes
	Init
	KIO
	Parts
	TextEditor
	WindowSystem
	XmlGui
)

These are directly visible in the other biggest clue, the openSUSE .spec file for their build of the their .rpm package. CMakeLists.txt also mentions find_package(Poppler COMPONENTS Qt5) as well as something similar for Okular which is also explicitly mentioned in the GitHub repository README.

My initial build attempt didn't get far because apparently the %configure as part of the setup step of the automatically generated skeleton of package.yml was not necessary. The corresponding message was to the effect that ./configure was not found. So I removed the setup step from package.yml and the subsequent build attempt progressed further.

The failure this time, according to the build error messages, was that KF5 component were not found. Because I couldn't find these components by using the methods in the YouTube tutorial, I assumed they were included in the plasma-framework-devel package. I finally found these components by looking through the Kate package.yml on the its page at the Solus developer site. All of these packages have names that atypically don't include "KF5" but are something like "ksomething-devel".

After adding these I had another build failure. This time the build error messages mentioned "ECM", which, on second look, were mentioned at the top of CMakeLists.txt. The openSUSE .spec indicated indirectly that this may be cmake-extra-modules, which I added to the build dependencies of the package.yml. The next build was successful. The final package.yml is below.

name       : kile
version    : 3.0.03
release    : 1
source     :
    - https://github.com/KDE/kile/archive/v3.0b3.tar.gz : ddc277e1589563475376067ad317eef5a8cc9f5cb82f1338619d6b6d52ddf4e1
license    : GPL-2.0-or-later
component  : editor
summary    : Kile is a user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor for the KDE desktop environment.
description: Kile is a user-friendly TeX/LaTeX editor for the KDE desktop environment.
builddeps  :
    - pkgconfig(Qt5Core)
    - pkgconfig(Qt5Script)
    - plasma-framework-devel
    - okular-devel
    - pkgconfig(poppler-qt5)
    - extra-cmake-modules
    - kcrash-devel
    - kdbusaddons-devel
    - kdoctools-devel
    - kguiaddons-devel
    - kiconthemes-devel
    - ktexteditor-devel
    - ki18n-devel
    - kinit-devel
    - khtml-devel
    - kio-devel
    - kparts-devel
    - kxmlgui-devel
rundeps    :
    - qt5-base
    - plasma-framework
    - okular
    - texlive
    - imagemagick
    - tar
    - zip
    - gzip
    - bzip2
    - kbibtex
    - jabref
build      : |
    %cmake
install    : |
    %make_install

The complete build dependencies for Kile are below. Note that all of these aren't explicitly included in the package.yml, but fortunately for me the ones that aren't included are dependencies of some of the ones that are, so they got installed as build dependencies into the span main profile image automatically.

Dependency	pkgconfig	pkgconfig provider	or package
Qt5Core	Qt5Core	qt5-base-devel	N/A
Qt5Script	Qt5Script	qt5-script-devel	N/A
Qt5Test	Qt5Test	qt5-base-devel	N/A
Qt5Widgets	Qt5Widgets	qt5-base-devel	N/A
Qt5DBus	Qt5DBus	qt5-base-devel	N/A
KF5Config	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kconfig-devel
KF5CoreAddons	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kcoreaddons-devel
KF5Crash	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kcrash-devel
KF5DBusAddons	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kdbusaddons-devel
KKF5DocTools	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kdoctools-devel
KF5GuiAddons	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kguiaddons-devel
KF5IconThemes	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kiconthemes-devel
KF5Init	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kinit-devel
KF5KHtml	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	khtml-devel
KF5KIO	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kio-devel
KF5Parts	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kparts-devel
KF5TextEditor	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	ktexteditor-devel
KF5WindowSystem	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	kwindowsystem-devel, dependency of plasma-framework-devel
KF5XmlGui	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	plasma-framework-devel
KF5I18n	N/A in Solus	N/A in Solus	ki18n-devel
okular-devel	N/A	N/A	okular-devel
extra-cmake-modules	N/A	N/A	extra-cmake-modules
poppler-qt5-devel	N/A	N/A	poppler-qt5-devel

The complete runtime dependencies for Kile, some of which are optional, are below.

Dependency	pkgconfig	pkgconfig provider	or package	Upstream Description
Konsole		N/A	konsole
TeXLive		N/A	texlive
ImageMagick		N/A	imagemagick
KBibTeX		N/A	kbibtex
psutils		N/A	psutils

Build

Finally, build the package with:

brook@g5-solus ~/Solus-LB/kile $ sudo solbuild build package.yml -p main-x86_64

from within the Kile package build directory. The option -p main-x86_64 is necessary in order to build against the stable solbuild profile. Without it the package would be built against the unstable solbuild profile.

sudo eopkg index --skip-signing /var/lib/solbuild/local/