Distributing Qri on AUR

[b5]

I've talked to 4 people in the past two weeks using Arch. Arch Linux users use AUR as a backing registry for pacman. It would be great if we can get the Qri CLI registered

cc @davidgasquez, who pointed me in the right direction!

In the meantime, let's get a copy of the latest binary complied for a few different linux architectures up & attached to our GitHub releases page.

[davidgasquez]

Hey there! Excited to help a bit with this one. First, you'll need to get an AUR account before doing anything so you're the maintainer and owner of the packages.

In the AUR, is common to find two versions of each Go package. For Yay, you can find yay-bin and yay-git. For popular Go packages that are already included on the official repositories, users maintain the -git package that will clone and build the tool from source(hugo-git, terraform-git, ...). There's a View PKGBUILD button on the right side of the website that will show the actual PKGBUILD that is using. The qri one will be really similar.

The Arch Wiki has a pretty extensive wiki on how to create a valid package. There's also information about Go packages and VCS. That said, I feel the leanest way to get qri there would be distributing a qri-bin using the latest Github release. Basically, that's what Yay is doing in its PKGBUILD (also kubeclt-bin). The version would need to be updated on the file manually with each new release!

In the other hand, if you want to have a qri-git, this is the summary of the steps required form the wiki:

1. Download the source tarball of the software to package.
2. Try compiling the package and installing it into an arbitrary directory.
3. Copy over the prototype /usr/share/pacman/PKGBUILD.proto and rename it to PKGBUILD in a temporary working directory.
4. Edit the PKGBUILD according to the needs of your package.
5. Run makepkg and check whether the package builds correctly.

That's basically what is doing the yay-git PKGBUILD.

The last part is uploading the PKGBUILD following the AUR submission guidelines.

[davidgasquez]

Just found an example of publishing to AUR from the CI. Keybase is publishing their PKGBUILD to AUR using Jenkins.

[b5]

Quick update on this. I'm literally stuck waiting on an email from the AUR signup right now. The keybase example is amazing (I ❤️ their codebase very much).

Another possible route would be switching to goreleaser, and using this comment as a guide. Part of my concern is we have a number of different places to support (brew, chocolaty, etc). Feels like we need a framework here.

Whatever solution we choose, I'll keep updating here with progress on the AUR side

[feep]

@davidgasquez, very thorough, thanks.

@b5, after you get AUR account, it is basically just a build chore.

Only bit to add:

In the AUR, is common to find two versions of each Go package. For Yay, you can find yay-bin and yay-git.

Sometimes, there are three. True in the case of yay as well.

• yay: current release, builds from source
• yay-bin: current release, installed as binary
• yay-git: dev version, git master or such, builds from source