Arch Linux

djsigmann

Member

Registered: 2022-09-04

Posts: 6

How do you maintain both your stable and dev packages?

Evening All,

I maintain casual-pre-loader-git, and have been thinking about creating another package for the latest release instead of the latest commit (casual-pre-loader).
Now, I could just copy my PKGBUILD into a new repo, set the latest tag's ref,  push it, and call it a day, but I was wondering if there might be a better solution.

I first considered using the split package system, but I quickly realized that the only function that can deviate between different packages in the same PKGBUILD is package(), nor can one set a distinct source array or pkgver.

The next idea I'm thinking to try would be using a macro processor like m4, granted, I'd need to read up on how to do that, as I've never used a macro processor before, it, but that'd allow me to, say, write a post-commit hook that runs the macro processor and adds the output to a new commit in another branch once for each package (e.g. release and dev branches). Alternatively, I could probably also get by with sed.

I could then simply push those branches to their respective remotes. However, git hooks aren't part of the checkout and so cannot be synced/saved/shared over git without manual intervention, and that does annoy me a bit.

Does anyone here happen to have a better idea on how one could do this? I've seen some tools for package authoring/maintenance mentioned on here before, and I do plan to check those out soonish to see if they could make this task any easier.