Zig packaging guidelines

15 Jun 2025

      hello,

I've just changed minisign from C to Zig since this is now supported by 
upstream (it was quite the journey though). I noticed we don't have any 
packaging guideline for Zig yet so I would like to propose adding one.

The example based on my notes is quite straight-forward:

```
depends=(
   glibc
)
makedepends=(
   zig
)

build() {
   cd "${pkgname}-${pkgver}"
   zig build --verbose -Dcpu=baseline -Doptimize=ReleaseSmall
}

package() {
   cd "${pkgname}-${pkgver}"
   install -Dm755 -t "${pkgdir}/usr/bin" zig-out/bin/example
}
```

Common gotchas were:

- The `zig build` command is essentially fully silent if no interactive 
terminal is attached, `--verbose` helped but it's still very little info
- Without `-Dcpu=baseline` the compiler is going to probe the build 
server cpu, which both causes problems with Reproducible Builds, but 
more importantly can also make the binary crash with `Illegal 
instruction` errors, since the default binaries aren't really distributable

Looking at the ncdu PKGBUILD shows there's some room for improvement:

```
build() {
   cd "${pkgname}-${pkgver}"

   DESTDIR="build" zig build \
     --summary all \
     --global-cache-dir ../zig-global-cache \
     --prefix /usr \
     --search-prefix /usr \
     --release=safe \
     -Dtarget=native-linux.6.1-gnu.2.38 \
     -Dcpu=baseline \
     -Dpie=true
}

check() {
   cd "${pkgname}-${pkgver}"

   zig build test \
     --summary all \
     --global-cache-dir ../zig-global-cache \
     --prefix /usr \
     --search-prefix /usr \
     --release=safe \
     -Dtarget=native-linux.6.1-gnu.2.38 \
     -Dcpu=baseline \
     -Dpie=true
}
```

More input very welcome, but I'm also fine with adding a very basic one 
by myself and whoever has something to add can just edit the wiki.

Never lose the plot,
kpcyrd