This weekend I spent some time working on creating FreeBSD packages of my software.
Background…
Way back when, I would use epm. It worked up until FreeBSD switched to pkgng, which was a long time ago. It looks like the author of epm has no interest in updating epm to create native packages on FreeBSD. Probably in no small part because pkgng changed things dramatically. It does make me wonder why epm is still in the ports tree, since its primary facility has not worked on FreeBSD for a long time.
At any rate, pkgng’s ‘pkg create …’ needs a manifest file in order to do what I need. It’s a relatively simple file, though it appears that it’s overly forgiving of missing/present quotes and commas (i.e. the grammar isn’t very rigorous). I’ll blame YAML here.
While I’d like to use libpkg to do what I need, the important data structures are in a private header file. Which presumably means it’s subject to change. And there appears to be no good way to get at the contents of a manifest without using the private header file. Though I’ve yet to look at using libucl to parse a manifest file.
I wrote my own FreeBSDPkg::Manifest class and helper classes, along with a lexer/parser for manifest files using flex and bison. The parser can populate a Manifest object from a manifest file. The manifest can then be manipulated as desired, and emitted to an ostream. For my own software packages, this will allow me to create a skeletal manifest file from the build, then further populate it with my files, then create a native FreeBSD package. What I have today works on libDwm, and the next release of libDwm will include the classes and some supporting applications.