Packaging guide and infrastructure

I have a first cut at a guide to making packages for PackMan here:
https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/RISC%20OS%20Packaging%20Guide

Please note this is a work in progress – there are lots of parts which could be fleshed out – but I thought it was better to make a start. In particular it doesn’t yet go into the details of packaging by hand if PackIt isn’t sufficient. I’ve also been setting up the infrastructure to allow submission of packages to the ROOL repository which is described in the guide.

Comments are always appreciated!

How do you add the ROOL repository to PackMan? I can’t find the URL for it anywhere obvious.

Also, is this now the “official” repo? I tried to join the packaging project a year or so ago, but the maintainer never get round to adding me. So I’ve not, until now, been able to distribute my software via a package manager.

There are four repos, three of which are already set up on RISC OS Pi. The URLs are listed here:
http://packages.riscosopen.org/

The repos are named by function, but they’re also handled by different people too… raspberrypi-system is ROOL-official, raspberrypi-programs-armv5 is riscos.info/riscpkg.org (ie existing packages) and raspberrypi-programs-armv7 is programs submitted with the mechanism described on the above page.

Graham Shaw, who owns riscpkg.org, is almost incommunicado these days so the above are ROOL-supported. Things that make it into riscpkg.org will be presented to RPi users (maybe with a day’s delay), but existing RiscPkg/PackMan users will need to add some of the above repositories to use these distros.

That’s the plan anyway – we’ll see how things go for the moment.

Just to add: while all the URLs are prefixed with raspberrypi- because that’s the release we were aiming for, the only packages specific to RPi are those like RaspberryPi-Firmware and RaspberryPi-ROM – the rest are suitable for other machines. Things in the ARMv5 repo might not be ARMv7 compatible, however.

Nice one, Theo. Keep up the good work! :)

Maybe add a link to the packages page from the main “Software” page?

Also – on the packages page (http://packages.riscosopen.org/packages/) the links in the navigation bar at the top are broken – they seem to be relative and expect to be on “www.riscosopen.org”.

Thanks, now fixed the nav bar links.

Should be HTTPS too, along with the Hub image fetch, else you look logged out.

Nice guide. I’m thinking to release the Dutch translation of RISC OS 5 via Packman. Is it possible to run some package installation/removal script during installation/deinstallation of a package? I realy need to replace some files in !Boot and some standard applications and of course if the package is removed those files must be restored again.

While there’s currently no way for PackMan to run pre/post install scripts, it will prompt to backup any files it finds that clash with those to be installed and do not belong to another package. I’m not sure if it does it automatically when you remove the package, but it can restore the backup to put you back to where you were before.

Replacing things in !Boot is possible – use these directories in the zip file:
System – for !System
Resources – for !Boot.Resources
Library – for !Boot.Library
Utils – for !Boot.Utils

As a worst-case you can also use Boot for !Boot itself, but this is mostly intended to ROOL purposes to upgrade bits of !Boot. You probably shouldn’t use it unless there’s no other way, and we’d want to vet packages that use it more closely to check.