Awesome
Recipes
This is a system for building static, dependent libraries for R packages. It is mainly intended to automate the maintenance of CRAN dependencies for the macOS build system, but the system is intended to be usable on other platforms as well. Resulting binaries are available at https://mac.R-project.org/bin/.
The idea is for package authors to submit pull requests for dependencies their packages require such that they can be automatically installed on the build VMs.
The dependency descriptions are simple DCF files. The format should be
self-explanatory, it follows the same conventions as DESCRIPTION
files in R packages. The required fields are Package
, Version
and
Source-URL
. Most common optional fields include Depends
and
Configure
.
There is a Perl script which will process the recipes and create a make
file which can be used to build libraries and their dependencies.
More recently, we have added a user-friendly command line tool simply
called build.sh
(requires bash
) which replicates the build as
performed on the CRAN machines. For example, to build all libraries
needed to build R use:
./build.sh r-base-dev
You can replace r-base-dev
with any recipe or use all
to build
all recipes. See ./build.sh -h
for a little help page.
Each library is built, packaged and installed. The
default locations used by the above script are /opt/R/$arch
and
/usr/local
. The former will be used if present where $arch
is
typically x86_64
or arm64
, otherwise /usr/local
is the
fall-back (not recommended).
For a more fine-grained control you can run
scripts/mkmk.pl
yourself and see the list of environment
variables at the bottom of this page for possible configurations.
Reference
-
Package:
name of the package (required) -
Version:
version of the package (required*). This version string can be substituted in other directives using${ver}
. -
Source-URL:
URL of the source tar ball (required*) -
Source-SHA256:
optional, SHA256 hash of the source file. If set, the integrity of the downloaded file is checked (recommended). -
Depends:
comma separated list of dependent recipes, i.e. recipes that must be successfully installed before this one. Optional version specification of the formrcp (>= min.ver)
is allowed for individual dependencies.
Most of the following entries are optional:
-
Configure[-<os>[-<ver>]][-<arch>]:
flags to add to theconfigure
script.<os>
is the lowecase name of the OS as returned byuname
,<ver>
is the major version of the OS (uname -r
up to the first dot) and<arch>
is the architecture of the platform. Multiple types can be specified and they are concatenated using precedenceos, ver, arch
. -
Configure-Subdir:
subdirectory containing the sources -
Special:
special recipe flags, currently onlyin-sources
is supported which forces the build to be performed inside the sources. -
Distribution-Files:
list of files (or directories) to include in the final distribution tar ball. Defaults to${prefix}
. This directive is intended only for restricting the content, installation is only supported for content under${prefix}
so no files outside that tree can be part of the final distribution. -
Configure-Script:
name of the configure script to use, defaults toconfigure
. If this option is set explicitly, then the default flags--with-pic --disable-shared --enable-static
and--prefix=/${prefix}
are no longer used under the assumption that the script is no longer autoconf-based and thus the equivalent flags should be supplied inConfigure:
or friends. -
Configure-Driver:
optional, if set, specifies the executable that will be called in order to process the configure script. If not specified it is assumed that the configure script is executable on its own. -
Configure-chmod
: optional, if set,chmod
is called on the configure script with the specified value prior to execution. Most commonly this is set to+x
if the sources fail to make the script executable. -
Install:
command to perform installation, defaults tomake install
and currently will be supplied withDESTDIR=...
which is expected to be honored. -
Build-System:
optional, if specified a driver namedconfigure.<build-system>
is expected to exist in thescripts
directory of this project which is copied to the sources of the library asconfigure
and should perform whatever operations are necessary to make the project autoconf-compatible. Currently we only provide driverscmake
which supports CMake andmeson-ninja
which supportsmeson
for configuration andninja
for builds. The latter must be installed, typically usingpip install meson ninja
(add--user
if you cannot install in the system location). Obviously, such systems are far more fragile so use only as a last resort. -
Suggests:
optional, comma separated list of packages (seeDepends:
) which are optional, but their presence can add functionality. Those packages will not be required, so the build can happen with or without them. If they are present, their presence will be recorded in the resulting manifest. -
Build-Depends:
optional, similar toDepends:
but the the listed packages are only required during the build stage and they will not be included in the binary manifest as dependency. This is used only for build tools likeautomake
.
(*) - virtual packages are packages that are only used to trigger
installation of other packages, they only create a target in the
Makefile
, but don't create any output themselves.
Those don't have Version:
nor Source.URL:
.
NOTE: Originally, the DCF keys were using R
notation such as
Source.URL
which was, unfortunately, later mixed with the Debian
notation such as Build-System
. To make the syntax consistent all
keys are now defined using the Debian notation (so Source-URL
).
The R
notation is still accepted (i.e., any .
in the keys is
treated as -
), but deprecated.
Building
Currently the build steps are
- download source tar ball
- unpack the tar ball
- move the contents to a directory with fixed naming scheme
- if a
<recipe>.patch
file exists, it will be applied with -p1 - create a build object directory
- configure in the object directory using all the accumulated flags from the recipe
- run
make -j12
- run
make install
withDESTDIR
set - change the ownership of content inside
DESTDIR
to 0:0 (unlesstar
supports--uid
/--gid
flags) - package
${prefix}
inside the destination into a tar ball - unpack the tar ball in the system location
Each dependency has to succeed in all the steps above before the next recipe is used. Makefile is used to determine the dependencies between the recipes.
Note: pkgconfig
system stubs are expected to exist for system
libraries such that they can be used as dependencies by pkgconfig
.
Some versions of macOS include them, but others may require manual
installation. Most recent macOS versions don't allow stubs in system
location since it is read-only, so adding an alternative path to
PKG_CONFIG_PATH
may be required. The build.sh
script automatically
adds the system stubs shipped with the recipes to PKG_CONFIG_PATH
.
To ensure compatibility the
sys-stubs
recipe provides a package which installs the system stubs (see
pkgconfig-sys-stubs
for the soruce).
Environment Variables
The mkmk.R
script will respect the following environment variables:
-
TAR
path to thetar
program. Note that the build system assumes a tar version that is smart enough to handle all common compression formats (gzip
,bzip2
,xz
) automatically. -
PREFIX
defaults tousr/local
and is the prefix for all builds. Note that no special effort is made for packages to respect that prefix at compile/link time, it is only passed to--prefix
and used to package the final tar ball. The recipes can use${prefix}
(exact match) to substitute for the relative prefix path (i.e., without the leading/
). This is not done at the shell level, but rather a substitution when generating theMakefile
. ThePREFIX
variable is available both at shell level and to the make commands by default. -
NOSUDO
if set to 1sudo
will not be used in the unpacking step. This is mainly useful for user-space installations when settingPREFIX
to a location owned by the user. -
PERL
command to runperl
interprerted. Defaults toperl
.