Hacking:Research/Automatic builds

1 Introduction

This article contains research to see if or how it could be possible to have automatic builds of PKGBUILDs in order to limit the amount of work required to manually rebuild packages.

2 Existing work

2.1 ALHP.GO

The ALHP.GO project has code to rebuild Arch Linux with different compiler flags, so it could work for Parabola.

2.2 Arch Linux

Arch contributors are supposed to build packages locally and upload them to the Arch Linux repositories. There is no automatic builds of the Arch Linux packages used by users[1].

While Arch Linux is involved in reproducible builds and has automatic build of packages for that (thanks to rebuilderd and other software), the build process doesn't take into account PKGBUILD dependencies[2].

[1] From #archlinux the 21 February 2024:

   < gromit> jelle: its the same for Arch, packager build & push from their local machines, optionally build on the (beefy) buildserver
   < gromit> wops, meant to tag GNUtoo

[2] From #archlinux the 21 February 2024:

   < jelle> rebuilderd is a scheduler and uses the exact packages used during building to rebuild the package
   < jelle> so it doesn't do anything for automatic building with regard of rebuild order.

2.3 Arch Linux ARM

Arch Linux ARM has automatic build scripts but they are not public[1].

[1] I looked for the code everywhere and cound't find it. In addition that was independently confirmed on #archlinux the 21 February 2024:

   16:14  * GNUtoo should probably ask archlinuxarm then as they seem to have some automatic build system in place
   16:17 < GNUtoo> For the reference they have "Custom PKGBUILD variables" like "noautobuild" (https://github.com/archlinuxarm/PKGBUILDs) so they probably have something, so I'll ask them later on about it. Thanks a lot for all the information.
   16:17 < jelle> GNUtoo: yes, they have an automatic rebuild thingy iirc
   16:18 < Foxboron> Which is not open-source
   16:18 < Foxboron> it's all private scripts

2.4 Arch Linux 32

Arch Linux 32 seems to have a public automatic build system.

2.5 Parabola

Parabola has automatic builds for the parabola-keyring package only.

3 Additional license

This page is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (or at your option, any later version) or at your option the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3.

By contributing to this page you also agree to assign copyright for your contribution to the Free Software Foundation (see LibrePlanet:Copyrights for details). The Free Software Foundation promises to always use either a verbatim copying license or a free documentation license when publishing your contribution. We grant you back all your rights under copyright, including the rights to copy, modify, and redistribute your contributions. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

The goal of this additional license is to enable to move this page inside the Libreplanet wiki if necessary as we have two FSDG compliant distributions that use the Arch Linux build system (Parabola and Hyperbola). See ParabolaWiki:Copyrights and LibrePlanet:Copyrights for more details.