PKGBUILDs

Contains PKGBUILD files for creating Arch Linux packages:

• Packages for my own applications and libraries such as Syncthing Tray, Tag Editor, Password Manager, ...
• Packages I maintain in the AUR:
  • misc packages, eg. Subtitle Composer, openelec-dvb-firmware, Jangouts
  • mingw-w64-* packages which allow to build for Windows under Arch Linux, eg. FreeType 2, Qt 5 and Qt 6
  • static-compat-* packages containing static libraries to build self-contained applications running on older GNU/Linux distributions under Arch Linux
  • android-* packages which allow to build for Android under Arch Linux, eg. iconv, Boost, OpenSSL, CppUnit, Qt 5 and Kirigami
  • apple-darwin-* packages which allow to build for MaxOS X under Arch Linux, eg. osxcross and Qt 5 (still experimental)
• Other packages imported from the AUR to build with slight modifications

So if you like to improve one of my AUR packages, just create a PR here.

Binary repository

I also provide a binary repository containing the packages found in this repository and a lot of packages found in the AUR:

[ownstuff-testing]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://martchus.no-ip.biz/repo/arch/$repo/os/$arch
Server = https://ftp.f3l.de/~martchus/$repo/os/$arch

[ownstuff]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://martchus.no-ip.biz/repo/arch/$repo/os/$arch
Server = https://ftp.f3l.de/~martchus/$repo/os/$arch

The testing repository is required if you have the official testing repository enabled. (Packages contained by ownstuff-testing are linked against packages found in the official testing repository.)

The repository is focusing on x86_64 but some packages are also provided for i686 and aarch64.

Note that I can not assure that required rebuilds always happen fast enough (since the official developers obviously don't wait for me before releasing their packages from staging).

Requests regarding binary packages can be tracked on the issue tracker of this GitHub project as well, e.g. within the general discussion issue.

Container image, building packages within a container

The directory devel/container contains a script to build a container image suitable to run Arch Linux's makepkg script so you can build from PKGBUILDs on any environment where Docker, Podman or any other suitable container runtime is available.

It also contains a script called makecontainerpkg which behaves like makechrootpkg from Arch Linux's devtools but uses the previously mentioned container image. Therefore it does not require devtools, a chroot setup and systemd-nsapwn. Instead, any container runtime should be sufficient (tested with Docker).

The usage of makecontainerpkg is very similar to makechrootpkg. Simply run the script in a directory containing a PKGBUILD file. If the directory contains a file called pacman.conf and/or makepkg.conf those files are configured to be used during the build. The call syntax is the following:

makecontainerpkg [cre args] --- [makepkg args]

Example where the host pacman cache and ccache directories are mounted into the container and a package rebuild is forced via makepkg's flag -f:

makecontainerpkg -v /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ -v /run/media/devel/ccache:/ccache -- -f CCACHE_DIR=/ccache

Set the environment variable CRE to the container runtime executable (by default docker) and set CRE_IMAGE to use a different container image.

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There's also the 3rdparty repository docker-mingw-qt5 which contains an image with many mingw-w64 package pre-installed.

Structure

Each package is in its own subdirectoy:

default-pkg-name/variant

where default-pkg-name is the default package name (eg. qt5-base) and variant usually one of:

• default: the regular package
• git/svn/hg: the development version
• mingw-w64: the Windows version (i686/dw2 and x86_64/SEH)
• android-{aarch64,armv7a-eabi,x86-64,x86}: the Android version (currently only aarch64 actively maintained/tested)
• apple-darwin: the MacOS X version (still experimental)

The repository does not contain .SRCINFO files.

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The subdirectoy devel contains additional files, mainly for development purposes. The subdirectoy devel/archive contains old packages that are no longer updated (at least not via this repository).

Generated PKGBUILDs

To avoid repetition some PKGBUILDs are generated. These PKGBUILDs are determined by the presence of the file PKGBUILD.sh.ep besides the actual PKGBUILD file. The PKGBUILD file is only present for read-only purposes in this case - do not edit it manually. Instead, edit the PKGBUILD.sh.ep file and invoke devel/generator/generate.pl. This requires the perl-Mojolicious package to be installed. Set the environment variable LOG_LEVEL to adjust the log level (e.g. debug/info/warn/error). Template layouts/fragments are stored within generator/templates.

Documentation about the used templating system

• Syntax
• Helper
• Utilities

Contributing to patches

Patches for most packages are managed in a fork of the project under my GitHub profile. For instance, patches for mingw-w64-qt5-base are managed at github.com/Martchus/qtbase.

I usually create a dedicated branch for each version, eg. 5.10.1-mingw-w64. It contains all the patches based on Qt 5.10.1. When doing fixes later on, I usually preserve the original patches and create a new branch, eg. 5.10.1-mingw-w64-fixes.

So in this case it would make sense to contribute directly there. To fix an existing patch, just create a fixup commit. This (unusual) fixup workflow aims to keep the number of additional changes as small as possbile.

To get the patches into the PKGBUILD files, the script devel/qt5/update-patches.sh is used.

Mass rebasing of Qt patches

This is always done by me. Please don't try to help here because it will only cause conflicts. However, the workflow is quite simple:

1. Run devel/qt5/rebase-patches.sh on all Qt repository forks or just devel/qt5/rebase-all-patches.sh
   • eg. rebase-patches.sh 5.11.0 5.10.1 mingw-w64-fixes to create branch 5.11.0-mingw-w64 based on 5.10.1-mingw-w64-fixes
   • after fixing possible conflicts, run devel/qt5/continue-rebase-patches.sh
   • otherwise, that's it
   • all scripts need to run in the Git repository directory of the Qt module except rebase-all-patches.sh which needs the environment variable QT_GIT_REPOS_DIR to be set
2. Run devel/qt5/update-patches.sh or devel/qt5/update-all-patches.sh to update PKGBUILDs
   • eg. devel/qt5/update-all-patches.sh "" mingw-w64 qt6 to consider all mingw-w64-qt6-* packages

Brief documentation about mingw-w64-qt packages

The Qt project does not support building Qt under GNU/Linux when targeting mingw-w64. With Qt 6 they also stopped 32-bit builds. They also don't provide static builds targeting mingw-w64. They are also relying a lot on their bundled libraries while my builds aim to build dependencies separately. So expect some rough edges when using my packaging.

Nevertheless it make sense to follow the official documentation. For concrete examples how to use this packaging with CMake, just checkout the mingw-w64 variants of e.g. syncthingtray within this repository. The Arch Wiki also has a section about mingw-w64 packaging.

Note that the ANGLE and "dynamic" variants of Qt 5 packages do not work because they would require fxc.exe to build.

Tested build and deployment tools for mingw-w64-qt5 packages

Currently, I test with qmake and CMake. With both build systems it is possible to use either the shared or the static libraries. Please read the comments in the PKGBUILD file itself and the pinned comments in the AUR for further information.

There are also pkg-config files, but those aren't really tested.

qbs and windeployqt currently don't work very well (see issues). Using the static libraries or mxedeployqt might be an alternative to windeployqt.

Tested build and deployment tools for mingw-w64-qt6 packages

In order to build a Qt-based project using mingw-w64-qt6 packages one also needs to install the regular qt6-base package for development tools such as moc. The packages qt6-tools, qt6-declarative and qt6-shadertools contain also native binaries which might be required by some projects. At this point the setup can break if the version of regular packages and the versions of the mingw-w64 packages differ. I cannot do anything about it except trying to upgrade the mingw-w64 packages as fast as possible. There's actually a lengthy discussion about this topi on the Qt development mailinglist so the situation might improve in the future. Note that as of qtbase commit 5ffc744b791a114a3180a425dd26e298f7399955 (requires Qt > 6.2.1) one can specify -DQT_NO_PACKAGE_VERSION_CHECK=TRUE to ignore the strict versioning check.

Currently, I test only CMake. It is possible to use either the shared or the static libraries. The static libraries are installed into a nested prefix (/usr/i686-w64-mingw32/static and /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/static) so this prefix needs to be prepended to CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH for using the static libraries. To generally prefer static libraries one might use the helper scripts provided by the mingw-w64-cmake-static package.

The build systems qbs and qmake are not tested. It looks like Qt's build system does not install pkg-config files anymore and so far no effort has been taken to enable them.

Note that windeployqt needed to be enabled by the official/regular qt6-tools package but would likely not work very well anyways. Using the static libraries or mxdeployqt might be an alternative for windeployqt.

Static plugins and CMake

Qt 5 initially didn't support it so I added patches to make it work. After Qt 5 added support I still kept my own version because I didn't want to risk any regressions (which would be tedious to deal with). So the official documentation does not apply to my packages. One simply has to link against the targets of the wanted static plugins manually.

However, for Qt 6 I dropped my patches and the official documentation applies. I would still recommended to set the target property QT_DEFAULT_PLUGINS of relevant targets to 0 and link against wanted plugin targets manually. At least in my cases the list of plugins selected by default seemed needlessly long. I would also recommended to set the CMake variable QT_SKIP_AUTO_QML_PLUGIN_INCLUSION to a falsy value because this pulls in a lot of dependencies which are likely not needed.

Further documentation

The directory qt5-base/mingw-w64 contains also a README with more Qt 5 specific information.

Running Windows executables built using mingw-w64 packages with WINE

It is recommended to use the scripts x86_64-w64-mingw32-wine and i686-w64-mingw32-wine provided by the mingw-w64-wine package. These scripts are a wrapper around the regular wine binary ensuring all the DLLs provided by mingw-w64-*-packages of the relevant architecture can be located. It also uses a distinct wine prefix so your usual configuration (e.g. tailored to run certain games) does not go into the way and is also not messed with.

Here are nevertheless some useful hints to run WINE manually:

• Set the environment variable WINEPREFIX to use a distinct WINE-prefix if wanted.
• Set WINEPATH for the search directories of needed DLLs, e.g. WINEPATH=$builds/libfoo;$builds/libbar;/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32.
• Set WINEARCH to win32 for a 32-bit environment (win64 is the default which will get you a 64-bit environment)
• Set WINEDLLOVERRIDES to control loading DLLs, e.g. WINEDLLOVERRIDES=mscoree,mshtml= disables the annoying Gecko popup.
• To set environment variables like PATH or QT_PLUGIN_PATH for the Windows program itself use the following approach:
  1. Open regedit
  2. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Environment
  3. Add/modify the variable, e.g. set PATH=C:\windows\system32;C:\windows;Z:\usr\x86_64-w64-mingw32\bin and QT_PLUGIN_PATH=Z:/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/qt6/plugins
• It is possible to run apps in an headless environment but be aware that WINE is not designed for this. For instance, when an application crashes WINE still attempts to show the crash window and the application stays stuck in that state.
• See https://wiki.winehq.org/Wine_User's_Guide for more information

Static GNU/Linux libraries

This repository contains several static-compat-* packages providing static libraries intended to distribute "self-contained" executables. These libraries are built against an older version of glibc to be able to run on older distributions without having to link against glibc statically. The resulting binaries should run on distributions with glibc 2.26 or newer (or Linux 4.4 and newer when linking against glibc statically), e.g. openSUSE Leap 15.0, Fedora 27, Debian 10 and Ubuntu 18.04. The packages might not be updated as regularly as their normal counterparts but the idea is to provide an environment with a recent version of GCC/libstdc++ and other libraries such as Qt and Boost but still be able to run the resulting executables on older distributions.

To use the packages, simply invoke /usr/static-compat/bin/g++ instead of /usr/bin/g++. The package static-compat-environment provide a script to set a few environment variables to make this easier. There are also packages providing build system wrappers such as static-compat-cmake.

It would be conceivable to make fully statically linked executables. However, it would not be possible to support OpenGL because glvnd and vendor provided OpenGL libraries are always dynamic libraries. It makes also no sense to link against glibc (and possibly other core libraries) statically as they might use dlopen. Therefore this setup aims for a partially statically linked build instead, where stable core libraries like glibc/pthreads/OpenGL/… are assumed to be provided by the GNU/Linux system but other libraries like libstdc++, Boost and Qt are linked against statically. This is similar to AppImage where a lot of libraries are bundled but certain core libraries are expected to be provided by the system.

Examples for resulting binaries can be found in the release sections of my projects Tag Editor and Syncthing Tray. Those are Qt 6 applications and the resulting binaries run on the mentioned platforms supporting X11 and Wayland natively.

Note that I decided to let static libraries live within the subprefix /usr/static-compat (in contrast to -static packages found in the AUR). The main reason is that my packaging requires a custom glibc/GCC build for compatibility and I suppose that simply needs to live within its own prefix. Besides, the version might not be kept 100 % in sync with the shared counterpart. Hence it makes sense to make the static packages independent with their own headers and configuration files to avoid problems due to mismatching versions. Additionally, some projects (such as Qt) do not support installing shared and static libraries within the same prefix at the same time because the config files would clash.

Copyright notice and license

Copyright © 2015-2022 Marius Kittler

All code is licensed under GPL-2-or-later.