Projects/KDE on Solaris/FOSS specfiles

Currently, solaris.bionicmutton.org/SRC contains tarballs that originate from Stefan Teleman's KDE4 on Solaris porting effort located on cvsdude.com. (http://kdesolaris.svn.cvsdude.com). The tarballs are almost always a relative directory starting with Solaris/, and containing patch, configure, build, and install scripts, as well as patches, and any custom files needed to build a module.

However, they are difficult to deal with, and regenerating them is a bit of a PITA, and pretty much makes working on KDE4 an exclusive club with secret handshake and associated drama.

Starting in the kde4-specs-440 tree, there is an effort going on to convert all those modules from the DUDE tarball, to a purely spec format. Due to the fact that the FOSS modules are built for both 32-bit and 64-bit, there are two components minimum to each module.

1) FOSS<modulename>.spec - this contains all the high level information, with package name, version, description, license, package dependencies, and a package list. Any new modules or updated modules should include a explicit package list, so that changes between versions of packages can be tracked. Globals in the plist is just sloppy, but I understand why it happens.

2) base-specs/base-<module>.spec - this contains pretty much what was found in the DUDE Solaris tarball (typically Solaris-PGKNAME-REVISION,MINORREV.tar.gz). Decomposing a Solaris tarball should go something like this:

a) extract all the patches. prefix them with the packagename-version, postfixed with an index starting at 01, and ending in .diff

typically, an apply_patches script has something like:

1. !/bin/sh

for file in \

    configure.diff \
    config.h.diff \
    Makefile.diff \
    somecfile.c.diff \
    somecfile.h.diff

do

    gpatch -p1 Solaris/diffs/$file

done

I convert it to read:

1. !/bin/sh

N=0

  for file in \
    configure.diff \
    config.h.diff \
    Makefile.diff \
    somecfile.c.diff \
    somecfile.h.diff

do NM=`echo $file | sed 's\.diff$,,'`

1. in case there's a trailing index value we want to remove...

NM=`echo ${NM} | sed 's,\.[0-9]*$,,'` N=`echo ${N} | awk '{printf "%.02d",$1+1}'`

1. strip off preceding 0 for the %patch command

Y=`echo ${N} | sed 's,^0,,'` mv $file Mypkg-1.0.1-${NM}.${N}.diff echo "Patch${Y}:\t\t%{patchprefix}-${NM}.${N}.diff" >> patchlist echo "%patch${Y} -p1" >> patching done

what this does is move all the files into a more "orderly" list with a created patchlist that can be imported into the base-spec file, as well as the patching order.

b) the section above %prep, is where you will insert "patchlist" Above patchlist, you %define patchprefixe %{src_name}-%{src_ver} so we don't have to care about changing the stupid patch file names every time we upreve a package.

c) in the %prep section, include "patching" file from above. Additionally, include the configure.sh, converting most ${} variables to %{} variables, unless they are truly shell variables.

d) in the %build section, import build.sh. clean it up

e) in the %install section, import install.sh, clean it up. This section is usually trickiest because of the way 32 and 64 bit binaries get made, and how some packages have a hard time honoring the configured paths.

All your new patches should go in spec/patches/%{src_name}/%{src_ver} and then symlink those into spec/patches.

The reason for doing this is very simple. This project is so complex with so many working parts, that it's impossible (unless you are truly a Mercurial *guru*) for normal folks to go back to a previous instance.

Using a very simple %if clause, a spec file can now support multiple revisions, with all the behavior customized off that specific version to include package requirements, explicit plists, patches, applying patches, configure changes, etc. It takes a little bit more effort than just chopping up a spec file because a bunch of stuff changed.