Making packages

Following Eric Boutilier's latest two posts on packaging and a conversation on #opensolaris, I was interested enough to try pkgbuild for myself. Of course, I'd forgotten about his earlier series of posts on the topic, so I'd forgotten the connection to JDS.

As a result, I started making packages without the JDS CBE (Common build environment). But it's worked pretty well. For example, on a standard Solaris 10 installation (03/05 for me, but anything should work):

• PATH=$PATH:/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin export PATH
  
• Download the pkgbuild tool from http://pkgbuild.sourceforge.net/.
• Unpack and install with a standard command ./configure && make && make install
• Grab this spec file for ruby-1.8.5 that I knocked up with the help of Eric's posts and Redhat's docs.
• As a non-root user run pkgtool --download --define="_prefix /opt/mypkgs" build-only ruby.spec
• Wait :)

It should create a ~/packages directory, download the source file with wget, compile it, build a package and put it in ~/packages/PKGS.