hhl/content/news/packaging-for-2021q2.md

+++
title = "Packaging for 2021q2"
date = 2021-02-26
[taxonomies]
tags = ["NonGNU","Packages","Pkgsrc","C Programming","POSIX"]
+++
I spent a good deal of the past couple weeks working on actually getting init up
and running, preparing kernel configurations for multiple architectures, and
learning about Das U-Boot in order to put up bootable images. Taking a little
break from that the last few days, I am now once again working at building a set
of packages using pkgsrc.<!-- more -->

Inevitably considering how many utilities have been replace in Hitch Hiker for
either BSD versions or scratch implementations, I have been running into breakage
in odd places. Most are relatively easy fixes. A few kept repeating in an
infuriating manner...

GNU autotools is an attempt to make a framework that allows building software on
multiple architectures and operating systems. I won't attempt to elaborate much
on how it works, but in order to support as many different systems as possible
the lowest common denominator is assumed when it comes to the infamous 'configure'
shell script, meaning that it is supposed to be POSIX compliant and not use any
extensions to the POSIX spec in relation to shell grammar. I'm mentioning this
because a whole bunch of Gnome related packages use the same test for intltool in
their configure sript. The gist of the test is this:
```Bash
intltool-update --version | head -1 | cut -f" " -d 3
```
I previously ran into this when compiling and testing Servo, the browser engine
formerly sponsored by Mozilla written in Rust. I was pissed at the time, because
it's such a simple thing. Basically, the POSIX spec only includes the -n option
when describing the behavior of the head utility. And my version of head did not
support the older syntax ```head -[num]``` as it is not possible to code that
sort of thing by just using getopt. The BSD head actually parses and rewrites
argv in order to support this. Not sure what GNU does but I'm sure it's a few
hundred lines that shouldn't be necessary.

The fact that this is the same test, with exactly the same syntax and whitespace,
is a dead giveaway that the package authors basically have just been copying and
pasting the same code without ever reading or understanding it. It's also indicative
of another thing I hate; passing --version to a utility should return a string of
numbers, not multiple lines including a copyright statement and author credit.
There should be no need for calling head to begin with.

Furthermore, checking for package versions is bad practice to begin with. Say I
created a fully functional drop-in replacement for intltool. It does exactly what
intltool does, it accepts the exact same input and gives identical output. If I
then tried to build any of these packages that check for a specific version of
intltool they would fail. Best practice is to check for capabilities, not version
numbers.

To fix the issue I did what I had said previously that I didn't want to do; made
the head utility in Hitch Hiker accept the non-conforming syntax. I also hacked
our BSD originating **uname** utility while I was at it to accept the GNU -o
option and just alias it to -s, as a few things had choked on that option.

### Creating a Hitch Hiker overlay for pkgsrc
One of the changes that I have been tinkering with in the base system without
success is the ability to build the other components of gcc beyond the C and C++
compilers. I have had no luck building the Go, Fortran, Objective C or Objective
C++ frontends with the sysroot build. So I tried to build the gcc10 version from
pkgsrc, only to have the Go compiler fail at the last moment. Interestingly, I
was able to build all of the components manually with zero issues. In looking at
the Makefile in pkgsrc/lang/gcc10 I realized that there's quite a lot of
conditionals to aid in building on different platforms and there are also quite a
lot of options passed to configure beyond what I normally use. In short, for our
limited purpose I thought that I could do better.

What I have created is a Hitch Hiker specific overlay for pkgsrc. Basically, the
overlay gets extracted in the same location as pkgsrc and adds some Hitch Hiker
specific packages, prefixed with hhl_ in their name. The hhl_gcc10 package is
beautifully simple, builds in approximately 1/3 the time as the pkgsrc version
(we skip the three stage bootstrap of gcc as we're compiling it with the same
version from the base system) and builds the C, C++, Fortran, Go, Objective C and
Objective C++ frontends. Additionally, the pkgsrc gcc10 package puts everything
under a different prefix, /usr/pkg/gcc10, rather than /usr/pkg. I don't like
adding extra prefixes in general, so I didn't follow suite with that practice.

I think this is actually a better solution in the long run than continually
patching pkgsrc for things that fail to build on Hitch Hiker. If a package
requires a specific change, I can create a new package that does build and it can
be installed with the name of the original to satisfy dependencies while we try
to get changes pushed upstream. In this way we can still have a fairly maintainable
set of Hitch Hiker specific changes, as they will live in their own repo.