Sugar Network/Recipe Specification


Service publishing workflow is similar to activities. There is an info file, here service/service.info, which describes current status(not history) of development process. All these fields, finally, go to feed file while publishing new version. Service.info file is an analog of scenario files in regular GNU/Linux distributions like .spec files in RPM.

[Service] section

File service.info' should contain at least [Service] section:

  • name, the identity of service, this field defines name of feed's root directory on the server http://download.sugarlabs.org/services/ as well
  • summary, short descriptive line
  • description, long descriptive line, to wrap long text, all lines after second, should start with spaces
    could be omited to reuse summary field
  • license, in 0install, typically a Trove category, as used on freshmeat.net, but could be fedora names, since the rest of sugar uses them
  • homepage web link to project home page

[Runtime] section

This section describes parameters that should be taken into account only if service has 0install implementations(including source implementations) in contrast with pure wrappers around native packages.

Section contains:

  • version, used only for services with native versioning scheme
  • binding, what environment variables, 0install should export to session which uses this service
binding = [prepend|append|replace] <variable-name> [<insert-text-to-prepand-variable-value>] [; ...]
  • main, for applications, path to exec file from service root directory
  • requires, for any arch and binary implementations, list of runtime services that should exist before using service
requires = <service-name> [<not-before-version>[-<before-version>]] [; ...]
  • exec, command how to make bundle for dist command, 0sugar will pick up newly created file in service root directory
    Shell command, executed from service root directory. If this command starts to get complicated, you should move it to a script and just set this attribute to the command to run the script.
    By default 0sugar just bundle entirely service directory excluding temporary files.
exec = make distcheck

[Library] section

Adds additional parameters if service is a library. Libraries should have plain version value and with age field, it will be used in libtool like style e.g. in autotools based projects.

Section contains:

  • age libtool like age of version

[Buildtime] section

File service.info could have optional [Buildtime] section which describes additional parameters that should be taken into account during other service(which uses this one) building i.e. it is an equivalent for *-dev(el) packages in GNU/Linux distributions.

Section contains:

  • requires, additional dependencies that will be required during building other service which depends on this one
  • files, list of files that will be included to buildtime.xml feed and won't be included to runtime.xml, format:
files = <glob-mask> [; <glob-mask> ...]
  • generate-documentation, if set, documentation project will be created on [1], for now only epydoc value is supported

[Build] section

If service contains binary implementations, this section should present to describe building process.

Section contains:

  • requires, what services should be installed before building this one from sources
requires = <service-name> [<not-before-version>[-<before-version>]] [; ...]
  • exec, command how to build binaries
    Its value is a shell command, executed inside the build directory $BUILDDIR. It must compile the source in $SRCDIR, putting the final result (ready for distribution) in $DISTDIR. If this command starts to get complicated, you should move it to a script (either inside the main source archive or in a separate dependency) and just set this attribute to the command to run the script.
    NOTE: This command will be executed not only in service developer environment but also on user side if proper binary wasn't found, so do not use here any development related commands like autogen.sh
    For example, followed command builds regular autotools based project
exec = "$SRCDIR"/configure --prefix="$DISTDIR" && make install

Support several ABIs of service dependencies

File service.info could contain other sections for various binary implementations. These sections are intended to describe particular dependencies environment and should contain only:

  • requires that overwrite Service's section requires

For example if service developer is going to add binary implementations for f9/f11, and the same service dependency in these distributions has different ABIs, activity developer has to build two additional binaries, for f9 and f11. In that case developer creates two sections F9 and F11, put exact dependency versions(to separate particular section from others) and invoke 0sugar dist_bin <section-name> in proper f9/f11 environment.