DeveloperWiki:Building in a clean chroot

Introduction

This article is part of the DeveloperWiki.

Why

Building in a clean chroot prevents missing dependancies in packages, whether due to unwanted linking or packages missing in the depends array in the PKGBUILD. It also allows you to build a package for the stable repositories (core, extra, community) while having packages from [testing] installed on your system.

Setting Up A Chroot

The devtools package provides tools for creating and building within clean chroots. TO make a clean chroot, firstly create the directory you want it to reside in. For the purposes of this article this will be called <chrootdir>. The create your chroot using

sudo mkarchroot -C <pacman.conf> -M <makepkg.conf> <chrootdir>/root base base-devel sudo

The -C and -M flags are optional, but it is recommended to provide these with clean pacman.conf and makepkg.conf files (directly from the pacman package) during first creation of clean chroot to ensure lack of user specific adjustments.

Edit the <chrootdir>/root/etc/makepkg.conf file to set the packager name and any makeflags. Also adjust the mirror list in <chrootdir>/root/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist and enable [testing] in <chrootdir>/root/etc/pacman.conf is wanted.

Building in the Chroot

Firstly, make sure your chroot is up to date with:

mkarchroot -u <chrootdir>/root

Then, to build a package in your chroot run

makechrootpkg -c -r <chrootdir>

The -c flag ensures the chroot is cleaned before building starts.

Handling Major Rebuilds

The cleanest way to handle a major rebuild is to create a new chroot and build your first package (typically the package you are doing the rebuild for). Then create a local repo in you chroot. To do this:

mkdir <chrootdir>/root/repo
chmod 777 <chrootdir>/root/repo

The chmod statement allows you to copy package files and create the local repo as your user rather than root.

cp <package> <chrootdir>/root/repo
repo-add local.db.tar.gz <package>

Then add the local repo to <chrootdir>/root/etc/pacman.conf

[local]
Server = file:///repo

and update your repo

mkarchroot -u <chrootdir>/repo

With every additional package rebuilt, copy the package to the local repo directory, add it to the repo database and update your chroot.