A Guide to Packaging: Arch Linux and Beyond

Expected duration: 25 mins

Reference doc: x.snehit.dev/pkt

Presentation: [[PENDING]]

Introduction

This workshop intends to put forth the intuition and ideas behind packaging software. The practical focus in this workshop shall be Arch Linux, however, evolving packaging systems shall be discussed by the end of the session.

Expected outcome

I'm expecting to provide a primer to packaging. Despite the demonstration on Arch Linux, I am expecting attendees to appreciate the process and build an intuition about how the process is similar whether they're building package for any Linux distribution or language library registries (npm, pip, cargo etc).

A secondary goal is to convey the ease with which its possible to compose packages and contribute back to the FOSS community. Despite a lot of students using Linux distributions, many never even think about contributing back to the distribution they're using. Packaging happens to be one of the tasks which is easy to do and a good starting point for contribution.

Details

The session starts with a brief introduction to the process of installing software and appreciating the difference between installers and package managers.

We then spend some time studying the anatomy of a package. For the purpose of this workshop, I'll open up two Arch Linux packages and discuss the structure file by file.

Once we have an idea about what a package is composed of, we then move on to building one. I'll write a PKGBUILD that builds a package from a simple hello world application using CMake.

After the demo, we'll end the session by discussing challenge in older package managers and newer innovations.