Bob - A Package Builder

Bob's goal is to become a simple but powerful, complete, and user-friendly utility for building pkgsrc packages.

Design Goals

There are two main methods currently used to update a pkgsrc installation.

Update-in-place using tools such as pkg_chk or pkg_rolling-replace. These tools operate directly on the target host, upgrading packages in turn. These are the simplest to set up and use, and so are reasonable popular amongst users, but have some major drawbacks:

• Upgrading in place means that if a a build error is encountered, the system may be left in a degraded state until the issue is fixed.

• Building directly on the system may end up finding tools and libraries on the host system that wouldn't be found otherwise, which may mask issues that would be exposed when building in a clean environment.

• Only one build can happen at a time, and dependency issues aren't discovered until build time.

Bulk builds using pbulk allow packages to be built inside clean sandboxes, and with the appropriate patches mean that builds can be performed in parallel. These solve a number of the problems with update-in-place builds, but do have their own drawbacks:

• Historically pbulk is notoriously difficult to set up and configure, and any problems can be very hard to diagnose.

• Support for concurrent builds and sandbox configuration is left to external patches and the user to configure manually.

• A separate tool such as pkgin needs to be used to upgrade the system using the resulting packages.

Bob aims to combine these methods into a best-of-both approach:

• Automatically set up build sandboxes, hiding away all of the complexity involved trying to support multiple operating systems.

• Perform a pbulk-style scan of the requested packages to ensure all of the dependencies are correct.

• Build packages inside sandboxes, using a directed acyclic graph to perform builds in the correct order, and take advantage of parallel builds where possible.

all with a user-friendly and easy to configure interface.