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Development

Documentation​

Note that for all changes you make to meerkat-docs, there may be equivalent documentation in docs.

Building​

Very soon, Meerkat DSA will build these packages in CI/CD. A lot of these approaches are messy just because I had to build in one of each different distro's container images and install in said images so I can smoke-test installation into a real system. Eventually this will be cleaned up.

Debian Package​

Run ./scripts/build-debian.sh, then run dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc, both in the root directory of the project. Note that this will clean the source tree, so you will lose some files and folders like node_modules and dist.

If you build this directly on the host system, you will have to make sure that the version of NodeJS you compile against is the exact same one that it actually runs on. The Debian package is hard-coded to run /usr/bin/node, but a lot of NodeJS installations nowadays use NVM to version NodeJS. Run which node to see if you're using it. You might need to run nvm use 20.19.1 (or something like that) before you even build the package. Then run it.

RPM Package​

Run

./scripts/build-rpm.sh
podman build -t meerkat-rpm-builder -f pkg/rpmbuilder.dockerfile .
podman run --rm -it -v "$PWD:/src" -v "$PWD/rpmbuild:/root/rpmbuild" meerkat-rpm-builder rpmbuild -ba /src/pkg/meerkat.spec

If using Docker, replace podman with docker. It should be a drop-in replacement.

You might see a ton of warnings pertaining to the executable bit being set on Javascript files. This is a bug with JSR, which I reported here.

Note that the fedora container image has a file /etc/dnf/dnf.conf that, by default excludes the installation of documentation from RPMs. You will need to modify the tsflags option to remove nodocs if you want to see your man pages show up. This took me days to figure out.

Alpine APK Package​

You have to run the script twice. Exit out when it brings you into the container shell for the first time.

./scripts/build-apk.sh
podman build -t apkbuilder -f pkg/apkbuilder.dockerfile .
./scripts/build-apk.sh
abuild checksum # automatically applies the checksum to APKBUILD
abuild # actually build it all
# Your packages end up here
apk add --allow-untrusted packages/home/x86_64/meerkat-dsa-4.0.0-r0.apk

Arch Package​

As with so many other containerized distros, it seems that the archlinux image also refuses to install man pages by default. Check /etc/pacman.conf and you'll see a NoExtract line with the man pages directory in it. You will want to remove this if you plan to install the docs and verify that they work.

You have to run the script twice. Exit out when it brings you into the container shell for the first time.

./scripts/build-arch.sh
podman build -t archbuilder -f pkg/archbuilder.dockerfile .
./scripts/build-arch.sh

In the shell of that container, run makepkg -g >> PKGBUILD to generate a signature over the source and append it to PKGBUILD. Then run makepkg -si to build the packages. From memory, I think this step might be interactive.

Install devtools and run makerepropkg meerkat-dsa-4.0.0-0-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst to check if the package is reproducible. I got a 503 and failed to retrieve meerkat-dsa-docs-4.0.0-0-x86_64, so I think I won't be able to check this until its actually published. Not sure. I eventually want to make this reproducible.