GNOME package guidelines
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The GNOME packages on Arch Linux follow a certain schema.
Contents
GNOME profile initialization
There is no GNOME profile initialization anymore. The old line below should be stripped from any PKGBUILD:
[ -z "$GNOMEDIR" ] && . /etc/profile.d/gnome.sh
GConf schemas
Many GNOME packages install GConf schemas. These schemas get installed in the system GConf database, which has to be avoided.
Some packages provide a --disable-schemas-install
switch for ./configure, which hardly ever works. Therefore, gconftool-2 has a variable called GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL
, whenever this is set, gconftool-2 will not update any databases.
When creating packages that install schema files, use
make GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL=1 DESTDIR=${pkgdir} install
for the package installation step in the PKGBUILD.
GConf schemas need to be installed and removed in the .install
file using pre_remove
, pre_upgrade
and post_upgrade
and post_install
. Use gconf-merge-schemas to merge several schemas into one package specific file, install or uninstall them with usr/sbin/gconfpkg --(un)install $pkgname
The usage of gconfpkg requres a dependency on gconf>=2.18.0.1-4 (or gconfmm>=2.20.0).
GSettings schemas
The GConf schemas will be replaced by GSettings schemas in the near future, but some applications (e.g. Empathy) already using it. GSettings uses dconf as backend, so all packages that contain GSettings schemas require dconf as dependency. When a new GSettings schema installed on the system, the GSettings database should be recompiled, but not when packaging.
To avoid recompiling GSettings database on packaging, use the --disable-schemas-compile
switch for ./configure. To recompile it on install, add the following line to the .install file using post_install, post_upgrade and post_remove:
glib-compile-schemas usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas
Scrollkeeper documentation
Starting from GNOME 2.20 there is no need to handle scrollkeeper anymore, as rarian reads OMF files directly. Scrollkeeper-update is a dummy these days. The only required thing now is to makedepend on gnome-doc-utils>=0.11.2.
.desktop files
Many packages install Freedesktop.org compatible .desktop
files and register MimeType entries in them. Running update-desktop-database -q
in post_install
and post_remove
is recommended (package should depend on desktop-file-utils in this case).
GTK icon cache
Quite some packages install icons in the hicolor icon theme. These packages should depend on gtk-update-icon-cache and should have gtk-update-icon-cache -q -t -f usr/share/icons/hicolor
(WITHOUT leading slash) in the post_install
, post_upgrade
and post_remove
function.
.install files
For many GNOME packages, all .install files look almost exactly the same. The gedit package contains a very generic install file: https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/gedit/repos/extra-x86_64/gedit.install
Basically, the only thing that has to be changed is the pkgname
variable on top of the .install
file. As long as pacman does not supply us with the pkgname
variable, we need to supply it in the .install
file.
When packages do not have gconf schemas, hicolor icon files, or .desktop
files, remove the parts that handle those subjects.
Example
For an example of above rules, take a look at the gedit PKGBUILD and the .install
file supplied above:
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/gedit/repos/extra-x86_64/