This page is a work in progress.

Patches

When supplying patches to software in oi-build, please:

Makefiles

GNU Makefile's syntax can be mind-bending, so the general purpose of this style guide is to provide suggestions for how to make files as readable as possible. There are three basic guidelines:

  1. Maintain minimalism and readability. The Makefile should not have redundant settings or rules or preserve commented out lines that are no longer required. They should do the minimum necessary to provide a consistent build and do it in a way that a person can readily understand.
  2. Write the file in the order of operations unless there are internal limitations that require variances. Where this is necessary, provide a comment unless the requirement is already established in developer documentation. 
    Thus a COMPONENT_PRE_CONFIGURE_ACTION should come before CONFIGURE_OPTIONS
    COMPONENT_BUILD_ENV should come before the build target is defined.
  3. The Makefile should produce a sample manifest that approximates what is actually packaged as closely as possible. It is acceptable for packaging to pull augments out of the component directory, but any other magic should be done using pre- and post-target actions in the Makefile rather than in the packaging manifest.

There are a number of conventions that should be respected, partly out of mechanics, partly for readability.

Legacy actions in .p5m files

Packages that have a pre-existing legacy action should have this left intact/unchanged, unless a package is being split up or the version bump is major, and it no longer makes sense to deliver the legacy action.

(The legacy action provides an SVR4 package entry in /var/sadm/pkg, so that the package shows up via pkginfo SUNWfoo - provided for backwards compatibility).

New packages that were not delivered via legacy SVR4 packages in previous versions of Solaris/OpenSolaris do not need a legacy action.