archlinux-metapkg

This project is no longer maintained, although pull requests will still be accepted. It will eventually be superceded by superpac.

metapkg creates metapackages for pacman based upon METABUILD files, which contain a concise syntax to describe what metapackages should be built. For some examples of metapackages, see my config-metapkgs repo.

Syntax

METABUILD files are constructed as a series of semicolon-separated statements of the form:

• .desc PACKAGE_NAME [PACKAGE_NAME ...] = VALID_STRING
• .ver PACKAGE_NAME [PACKAGE_NAME ...] = VALID_STRING
• .rel PACKAGE_NAME [PACKAGE_NAME ...] = VALID_STRING
• [.deps] PACKAGE_NAME [PACKAGE_NAME ...] = PACKAGE_LIST
• .optdeps PACKAGE_NAME [PACKAGE_NAME ...] = PACKAGE_LIST
• .provides PACKAGE_NAME [PACKAGE_NAME ...] = PACKAGE_LIST

Where the .directive keywords are case-insensitive.

Optionally, a statement may be prefixed with .arch VALID_STRING [VALID_STRING ...]: to indicate that the statement will only be executed on a system whose architecture matches one in the list. This, coupled with the fact that multiple .deps, .optdeps, and .provides statements are allowed, lets you add dependencies on certain architectures without repeating yourself. Calling the .desc, .ver, and .rel directives twice will replace the contents of the fields.

Shell-style # comments are also allowed, where information between the # and the end of the line is omitted by the parser.

A few more specifics:

• PACKAGE_NAME are valid pacman package names, containing alphanumerical ASCII characters, hyphens, underscores, at signs, and full stops. Package names may also not start with full stops or hyphens.
• PACKAGE_LISTs are whitespace-delimited lists of PACKAGE_NAMEs and MODIFIERs.
• MODIFIERs are either +, -, ++, or --.
• VALID_STRINGs are either valid package names or string enclosed in double quotes, inside which double quotes may be escaped. Conveniently, valid version numbers in pacman are also valid package names, although I've heard that if you use numbers for package names, you're a terrible person.

Modifiers

When an extra modifier is seen in a package list, it modifies the list's state and changes how packages and groups are added to the package list. The start state is +. Modifiers include:

• +: Add following packages or groups to the dependencies for the metapackage. Shows an error if a package or group does not exist in the repositories or AUR and is not installed locally.
• -: Removes following packages or groups from the dependencies for the metapackage. Shows an error if the package or group is not already in the dependency list.
• ++ and --: Same as + and -, although, the parsers continues without error if a package or group is not found.

Usage

To build the packages, simply run metapkg in the same directory as your METABUILD file. This will create a pkg directory with one PKGBUILD file for your metapackages. For safety reasons, metapkg will not overwrite an existing PKGBUILD file without the -f option.