Gentoo Development

• If you write a simple ebuild, you still have to place it in the main Portage tree or in an overlay.

• Apparently you don't get the auto-resume feature automatically. Nor do you get MD5 verification.

General Ebuild development guide

• A list of important variables available when writing ebuilds:
  • ${S}: Path to the temporary build directory.
  • ${P}: Package name and version.
  • ${PV}: Package version.

• ebuild myebuild-1.0.ebuild digest will create the manifest for you. It must be able to access the distribution file. If the SRC_URI does not work yet, put the distfile in /usr/portage/distfiles directly.

• Patches must be kept in the files/ directory of the ebuild location if they are small. They should not be compressed.

• Create a patch in the following way:

diff -u original-file.c modified-file.c > packagename-1.2.5-file.patch

• dodoc always acts even if doc USE flag is not set, thus write something like:

use doc && dodoc doc/manual.pdf

Java Ebuild writing guide

• Official Guide

• ANT_TASKS can be set (and should be set) manually on the ebuild, but only in src_compile() or src_test(). Note that ANT_TASKS basically controls the Ant class path, which is different than the one for javac. So -Dgentoo.classpath, for example, does not affect Ant classpath.

• The jar names should not contain version number, if you need to rename them, there is an eclass for that: java-pkg_newjar.

• If a package provides differents APIs, the package should be always SLOTed based on the version of the API.

• If you use eclasses such as java-pkg_getjars twice, the jars will be recorded twice in package.env.

• If some library needs to be used only during the build, use java-pkg_getjars --buildonly. The dependency won't be recorded into package.env.

• Inheriting java-ant-2 adds dev-java/ant-core in DEPEND, so no need to add it explicitly.

• If a package installs an Ant task, it should be registered in src_install() with java-pkg_register-ant-task. There should also be an RDEPEND on >=dev-java/ant-core-1.7.0.