Basic Handling of ABS (Arch Build System)

Hello people, this time I'm going to talk a little about ABS (Arch Build System)In short, it is the system of ports with which it counts Archlinux.

What can I do with ABS?

Those of us who like to play with PKBUILDS , abs what allows us is to "download" all the PKGBUILDS from the Archlinux repositories packages, and modify them at will, for example, to add or remove flags in the compilation instructions, to enable or disable any particular feature of a program

Installing and commissioning ABS

To do this, we are going to install abs:

sudo pacman -S abs

Then we are going to synchronize the PKGBUILDS tree of the official repos:

sudo abs

we are going to obtain an output similar to this:

Then the downloaded PKGBUILDS are found in / var / abs

Practical example: ABS and Gnome 3.16

I am using the beta of Gnome 3.16 (3.15.91), in Archlinux, and although it works (it has details obviously) in Arch particularly, there are missing applications that, for example, the alpha of Fedora 22 already brings, in my case a couple of the ones I was looking forward to, EOG and Nautilus, so now I'm going to show you how to use ABS, in order to compile the beta version of EOG in this case.

So, we place ourselves in a directory where we want to compile, and we bring the EOG PKGBUILD from / var / abs / extra / eog , I personally usually prefer the terminal, therefore in my case I ran:

cp -r /var/abs/extra/eog $(pwd)

This way I already had the pkgbuilds ready to modify. Then I noticed him GNOME ftp which was the latest version of EOG available, and I proceeded to modify the PKGBUILD

Now I proceed to put the correct checksum (in the previous screenshot it is already set):

[x11tete11x @ Jarvis eog] $ makepkg -g ==> Receiving the sources ... -> eog-3.15.90.tar.xz has been found ==> Generating the checksums for the source files ... sha256sums = ('95fb566241f492f043d2e9d7301b657d159d68dbb51ba29d88c52a8b7ba8d243')

and ready! 😀 now I just compile and install it:

[x11tete11x @ Jarvis eog] $ makepkg -sic ==> Creating the package: eog 3.15.90-1 (Sun Mar 15 21:50:32 ART 2015) ==> Checking dependencies while running ... ==> Checking dependencies while compiling ... ==> Receiving the sources ... -> eog-3.15.90.tar.xz has been found ==> Validating the sources with sha256sums ... eog-3.15.90.tar.xz ... Approved ==> Extracting the sources ... -> Extracting eog-3.15.90.tar.xz with bsdtar ==> Removing the $ pkgdir / directory ... ==> Starting build () ... checking for a BSD-compatible install ... / usr / bin / install -c checking whether build environment is sane ... yes

And that's it 😀

Obviously this can be done with as much package as they want and they can activate or deactivate features at will (for example they can compile Audacious by activating its QT interface and deactivating the GTK interface)