3.0.0 Breaking Changes

[wizard-28]

Breaking changes

What is happening

Pacstall will be releasing v3.0.0 Cobalt soon. We follow Semantic Versioning, and as such, the change from 2.0.1 -> 3.0.0 means that breaking changes have been introduced.

How is this happening

pacstall/pacstall#636 switches the package installation procedure from stowing to making native Debs, which is a long overdue change that we finally have gotten around to fixing.

What does this break for...

Pacscript developers

This means that packages containing symlinking commands such as ln now cannot be run inside prepare, build, or install. The only function that they should be used in is postinst, as the package contents will be unpacked before posinst is run, and they should be unlinked in removescript. Additionally, -deb pacscripts should include the gives variable, which should be assigned to the actual package name (IE: vscodium-deb should have gives="codium"). Also, you must make sure that your depends and build_depends are correct, and that packages are not mixed between them, because now build_depends will install first, and depends will install during the Deb installation, meaning if you currently have packages that should be in build_depends, but are in depends, they will not work.

Pacstall users

If you update/reinstall your packages after upgrading to 3.0.0, they will be reinstalled as a deb. You, as the end user should not see any major differences in the way you use Pacstall, but if you see anything strange or broken, please create an issue here.

What are we doing, and what should you do

Pacscript maintainers should test all their packages in a docker running the develop branch just to make sure their packages work, along with helping us find bugs. Pacstall devs will also be checking scripts at random during this time as well. We may create PRs that refactor your scripts to move around symlinking commands to places that will work on 3.0.0. They will continue to work on current versions as well.

Additional information

Until release, the develop branch should be considered unstable, with bugfixes being introduced quickly. Please look here for PRs that may fix issues you encounter, along with this mega-PR that we are actively updating during this time.

When transitioning to symlinking in postinst, you must remember that the package has already been installed, meaning that you should not be using variables such as STOWDIR or pkgdir. Here is an example:

postinst() {
	sudo ln -s /opt/myprogram/bin/myprogram /bin/myprogram
}

removescript() {
	sudo rm -f /bin/myprogram
}

Additionally, because we are moving away from using Stow, the STOWDIR variable that is used in almost all scripts is a misnomer. You are free to continue using it in packages, or you can switch to the already existing pkgdir variable which is the full path to the installation directory ($STOWDIR/$name). It is not likely to be deprecated, as the variable has been around since the beginning of Pacstall.

CC: @pacstall/pacscript-maintainers

[Elsie19]

• yabridge
• ardour-git
• postman-bin (refactor(postman-bin): move symlinks to postinst #1605)
• i3-gaps
• exploitdb-git
• geekbench-gin
• onnxruntime-1-7-0-bin
• smartgit
• gfn-electron-bin
• tidal-hifi-bin
• pycharm-community-bin
• android-studio
• awesome-git
• arduino-ide-bin
• wine-staging-git

These are the packages that use symlinking commands

[echometerain]

the symlinks in exploitdb-git is alread in postinst()

[echometerain]

smartgit also

[Zahrun]

onnxruntime-1-7-0-bin, geekbench-bin, pycharm-community-bin, android-studio also