xbstrap is a build system designed to build "distributions" consisting of multiple (usually many) packages. It does not replace neither make and ninja nor autoconf, automake, meson or cmake and similar utilities. Instead, xbstrap is intended to invoke those build systems in the correct order, while respecting inter-package dependencies.

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xbstrap is available from PyPI. To install it using pip, use:

pip3 install xbstrap

See the boostrap-managarm repository for an example bootstrap.yml file.

Installing all tools (that run on the build system) is done using:

xbstrap install-tool --all

Installing all packages to a sysroot (of the host system):

xbstrap install --all

It is often useful to rebuild specific packages. Rebuilding package foobar can be done by:

xbstrap install --rebuild foobar

If the configure script shall be run again, use instead:

xbstrap install --reconfigure foobar

When developing xbstrap, you must install your local copy instead of the one provided by the pip repositories. To do this, run:

pip install --user -e .

For containerized builds, most xbstrap commands will run in two stages: once on the host, then again on the container to actually execute the build steps. Therefore, installing xbstrap locally (as shown above) is not sufficient in this case.

In addition, you must change your Dockerfile so that instead of grabbing xbstrap from the pip repositories, it installs from the host:

1. Add the following lines (replace /local-xbstrap at your convenience):

ADD xbstrap /local-xbstrap
RUN pip3 install -e /local-xbstrap

1. Copy or symlink your local xbstrap into the same folder that contains the Dockerfile, so that it can be accessed by the previous step.
2. Rebuild the docker container as usual.

To avoid running into the CI complaining about formatting, linting can be done in a pre-commit hook. To enable this, run:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks