Setup an Arch Linux ABS System in a Chroot Environment

As I mentioned in my earlier blog posts, I have started using Unity on Arch Linux. However the packages that are hosted at http://unity.xe-xe.org/ haven’t been updated in a while and has resulted in some conflicts with the updates coming through the main repositories. I have written an email to the person who’s managing the repo, but decided to build my own packages as well. This is how I setup a pristine chroot environment to build the Unity PKGBUILDS created by Xiao-Long Chen. I’m not sure if its the prescribed way to do it, but it works!

Steps to setup the chroot environment to build packages using ABS:


sudo pacman -S devtools
mkdir ~/Developer/unity/chroot -p
UNITYCHROOT=$HOME/Developer/unity/chroot
sudo mkarchroot $UNITYCHROOT/root base base-devel sudo
sudo arch-chroot $UNITYCHROOT
adduser pratik
pacman -S sudo git abs
sed -e 's/# %wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL/%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL/' /etc/sudoers
usermod -G wheel pratik
su pratik
sudo abs
cd /home/pratik
cp -R PKGDIR /home/pratik #if you wanted to create a single package then copy it to the home directory and build it
cd PKGDIR 
makepkg -s
Prescribed way of creating single packages is documented here.

To create the Unity Packages, there’s a build script which was posted on the Arch Linux BBS and I have forked that gist.

The steps below show how to use the build script to create Unity Packages.


#Create Unity Packages from the PKGBUILDs created by Xiao-Long Chen
cd /home/pratik
Download the gist as unity-builder.sh
chmod +x unity-builder.sh
./unity-build.sh

The script isn’t without its faults and might not build smoothly for all packages. I’m still working on clearing out the kinks.

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