[pacman-dev] Splitting packages with makepkg

[Henning Garus]

Am Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:29:36 +1000
schrieb Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:

> Hi all,
> 
> Now that pacman 3.2 is out the door and the initial bug fixes appear 
> done, I am going to work on adding the package splitting feature to
> makepkg.
> 
> So the time has come for some input on the prototype PKGBUILD for 
> splitting packages again.  We discussed this a couple of months ago
> on this list 
> (http://archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2008-June/012123.html).
> From that discussion I have come up with a PKGBUILD prototype which I
> like (prototype 1 at http://dev.archlinux.org/~allan/splitpkg.html)
> which is inspired by the KDEMod method but has a few significant
> differences.
> 

Silly things first, you're missing a 2 in your pkgname array.

Now my (maybe) more useful comments:

This looks very much like the PKGBUILD I already had in my head after
reading the other threads and thinking about splitting packages. While
thinking I became unsure about two things:

1) Is one build function enough? In an older thread someone (Aaron I
think) talked about building packages with different configurations
from one packagebuild. I am not sure you can do this with one build
function. What you could do, is using the package functions to do this,
this would go against the "minimal fakeroot usage" thing, but is
probably sufficent for something rather uncommon. An alternative would
be, checking for build_pkgname functions and calling them if they are
defined.

2) This is a bit implementation specific, but I think it is important.
Is there any way, except parsing the PKGBUILD file, to get the contents
of all depends arrays, to check the depends before building the package?
If not, overriding depends could be problematic.