Retroactively fixing the world
There seems to be some serious confusion around the way directories are installed in Gentoo. In this post, I would like to shortly explain the differences between different methods of creating directories in ebuilds, and instruct how to handle the issues related to installing empty directories and volatile locations.
Continue reading “Empty directories, *into, dodir, keepdir and tmpfiles.d”
Back when EAPI 6 was approved and ready for deployment, I have written a blog post entitled the Ultimate Guide to EAPI 6. Now that EAPI 7 is ready, it is time to publish a similar guide to it.
Of all EAPIs approved so far, EAPI 7 brings the largest number of changes. It follows the path established by EAPI 6. It focuses on integrating features that are either commonly used or that can not be properly implemented in eclasses, and removing those that are either deemed unnecessary or too complex to support. However, the circumstances of its creation are entirely different.
EAPI 6 was more like a minor release. It was formed around the time when Portage development has been practically stalled. It aimed to collect some old requests into an EAPI that would be easy to implement by people with little knowledge of Portage codebase. Therefore, the majority of features oscillated around bash parts of the package manager.
EAPI 7 is closer to a proper major release. It included some explicit planning ahead of specification, and the specification has been mostly completed even before the implementation work started. We did not initially skip features that were hard to implement, even though the hardest of them were eventually postponed.
I will attempt to explain all the changes in EAPI 7 in this guide, including the rationale and ebuild code examples.
The pkgcheck instance run for the Repo mirror&CI project has finished gaining a full support for GLEP 73 REQUIRED_USE validation and verification today. As a result, it can report 5 new issues defined by that GLEP. In this article, I’d like to shortly summarize them and explain how to interpret and solve the reports.
You should know already that you are not supposed to rely on Portage internals in ebuilds — all variables, functions and helpers that are not defined by the PMS. You probably know that you are not supposed to touch various configuration files, vdb and other Portage files as well. What most people don’t seem to understand, you are not supposed to make any assumptions about the ebuild repository either. In this post, I will expand on this and try to explain why.
Continue reading “Why you can’t rely on repository format (PMS)”
In my previous post I have described a number of pitfalls regarding Gentoo dependency specifications. However, I have missed a minor point of correctness of various dependency types in specific dependency classes. I am going to address this in this short post.
There are three classes of dependencies in Gentoo: build-time dependencies that are installed before the source build happens, runtime dependencies that should be installed before the package is installed to the live system and ‘post’ dependencies which are pretty much runtime dependencies whose install can be delayed if necessary to avoid dependency loops. Now, there are some fun relationships between dependency classes and dependency types.
Continue reading “Dependency classes and allowed dependency types”