Arch for SUSE package development
I work across multiple computers: home PC, my own laptop, company PC and laptop.
And I like to use Arch for my daily work everywhere. The problem is that
Linux does a poor job to support new hardware, more so for less known brands.
For example the sleep/hibernation on my AMD-laptop constantly breaks. So I've
opted for a VM/Linux + Windows/Linux setup. My Arch runs inside the
VirtualBox, and basically all I need is to sync the vm to have a consistent
working environment EVERYWHERE! It took me about one month to adapt to this new
layout, but it feels superb!
A little off topic;P, just a little background.
This article introduces my simple package for making Arch a good environment
for SUSE package development.
Code
It's only a PKGBUILD file now. Here is the link: arch-suse-dev-setup. Alpha
stage.
Some Highlights
RPM macros
osc works flawlessly on Arch. Errors/warnings are shown when you rpmbuild
-bp the source. Many RPM macros are missing, some are SUSE-specific, some are
upstream macros considered common on SUSE machines. And thus chasing down files
with these macro definitions is the first task.
The most useful command is this rpm --showrc. You can find path definitions,
custom macro file naming pattern and etc.
suse_version
It's defined in the OBS project configuration, so no problem in osc build.
However, rpm is not OBS-aware, so it would not read project configuration.
rpm will find this value in the local macro file, which records the version of
the running SUSE, which usually is not the same as the one in project
configuration.
In my package, I have default the version to openSUSE:Factory and warns the
user that they might need to overrides this macro.
Can we make this better? I am thinking of the envsetup in Android, which
before any coding happen setup the environment and introduce lots of useful
utilities. osc should setup the current environment as well, so that tools
like rpm would be configured right. Definitely on my TODO list.
Fake utilities
For code hacking/patching, rpm will only execute %prep part of the SPEC
file. Even so some tools missed from Arch are still used. Among them the
translation update scripts are mostly notable.
Since I am not interested in translation texts, I made fake utilities that does nothing. This works fine translations.
Status
rpm -bp and quilt setup now works like a charm, not a single warnings or
errors, at least for the packages I've been working on.
Update
I'm picking up new packages along the way! Add
obs-service-source_validator and obs-service-format_spec_file-git. They are all uploaded to AUR
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