Package definitions

A recipe build can result in a number of packages being produced from a single source, through an automatic splitting system. Certain subpackages are already defined in the boulder project to ensure consistency of package splitting and names, whereas some may be explicitly defined in a recipe to fine-tune the results.

Every recipe also contains a root package definition, i.e the default target. This is merged with the standard metadata.

Package metadata

summary

A brief, one line description of the package based on its contents.

description

A more in depth description of the package, usually sourced from a README or project description.

rundeps

A list of manually specified runtime dependencies. These may be added to ensure that one split package depends on another, or to add a hard dependency that is not accounted for by the automatic systems.

Example:

rundeps:
    # Depend on subpackage in this set ending with `-devel`
    - "%(name)-devel"
    - filesystem

Defining a subpackage

Additional packages may be defined by extending the packages set, and matching a set of paths to include in that subpackage.

For example:

packages:
    - "%(name)-tools":
        summary: Cool tools package
        description: |
            Provides a cool set of tools!            
        paths:
            - /usr/bin/extra-tool

Note that automatic dependencies and providers still work with subpackages, so binary deps will resolve without having to manually specify those.

Overriding defaults

To override splitting in the root package, for example, to avoid -devel subpackage when building a headers-only package, you could do:

paths:
    - /usr/include

To add to a predefined package, such as -docs:

packages:
    - "%(name)-docs":
        paths:
            - /usr/share/custom-docs