unibuild - what it was, and is

It was a simplistic system to automate the build and creation of bleeding edge software packages.
It is now a reference as to how this may be accomplished.

repochk

The core helper script was subdivided into its current Arch implementation and repodeb. It can be used to automate the rebuilding of compliant PKGBUILD projects, backup to a specified drive, and update installed packages.

Ubuntu

Having built the 100+ projects, hundreds of times, the strength of the core scripts and patches became a visible weakness.

They collect information needed to make the projects, and build their debian packages (via checkinstall). It requires the creation, or amendment, of countless Gnu Makefiles and CMakeLists.txt to provide the actual install directive (to place the software where it needs to be in the filesystem). This is laborious to maintain since it's outside the scope of the developer; as they make changes, the patches need to be updated on a near continuous basis.

checkinstall as a packager is simply not up to the task for actual deployment. Ubuntu LTS was a day old when it rolled out which doesn't lend itself to building anything bleeding edge.

Manjaro

Many times I worked on a patch for a project only to abandon it when the developer updated their ancillary libraries to a version that was out of reach for Ubuntu LTS. If you want to make bleeding edge, you have to be bleeding edge.

An end and beginning

I've begun to adapt Debian (Ubuntu) patches to work on Arch (Manjaro). The original patches, and unibuild script, created a road map on how to build and package the projects. They adapt fairly easily to Arch's PKGBUILD system. Compare xash3d and uhexen2 to get a feel for it.

Arch packages are patchified so, assuming you build where source code projects reside, a command like this would prepare the folder hierarchy and files:

pch=xash3d ; cd $HOME/Dev && patch -Np1 -i unibuild/data/arch/$pch.patch ; cd $pch ; makepkg -f

Patches shouldn't clobber as long as each entry has a date/time stamp. A command like this will reset all files to the same:

perl -pi -e 's/((\-|\+){3}\s(a|b)[\w\/.-]+).*$/\1\t1969-12-31 17:00:00.000000000 -0700/gi' *.patch

What value is there now?

The information remains relevant and my customized game launching scripts provide an interesting way to adapt certain software to a global installation. The afore mentioned xash3d and uhexen2 don't have an Arch candidate. Xash3D does, but not for native 64-bit, which all of these patches were made for.

noabody / unibuild