Building Packages

# Build a package
makepkg -sicf

# List files installed by a *.pkg.tar.zst archive
pacman -Qlp ./my-package.pkg.tar.zst

Packaging in a Container

Assuming the package directory is the current directory, we can start up an Arch Linux Container to facilitate packaging. Create a dummy user and install the base-devel package.

host$ sudo chown -R 100999:100999 .
host$ podman run --rm -it -v $PWD:/home/user docker.io/archlinux/archlinux:latest
container# pacman -Sy base-devel git
container# useradd -u 1000 -U -G wheel user
container# passwd user
container# su user
container$ cd
# ...Do work...
host$ sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -u) .

This creates a user with UID 1000 (inside the container). Outside of the container, this user will have an effective UID based on the mappings setup in /etc/subuid. For a container created by user edtwardy on the host, a user with UID 1000 inside the container will have the effective host UID of 100999, if /etc/subuid contains the following mapping:

edtwardy:100000:65536

The root user inside the container will have the effective host UID of the user who created the container.

To edit files from the host, use podman-unshare(1):

host$ podman unshare nvim PKGBUILD

Downloading the Sources of a Package

There is conflicting information about this on the forums. Old posts reference a tool that no longer exists, called asp. The new tool is pkgctl:

The following downloads the PKGBUILD for the arm-none-eabi-gcc package:

$ pkgctl repo clone --protocol=https arm-none-eabi-gcc