Table of Contents
The PLIST file contains a package's
“packing list”, i.e. a
list of files that belong to the package (relative to the
${PREFIX} directory it's been installed in)
plus some additional statements - see the
pkg_create(1) man page for a
full list. This chapter addresses some issues that need
attention when dealing with the PLIST file (or files, see below!).
Be sure to add a RCS ID line as the first thing in any
PLIST file you write:
@comment $NetBSD: plist.html,v 1.68 2006/03/01 17:23:21 rillig Exp $
You can use the make print-PLIST command to output a PLIST that matches any new files since the package was extracted. See Section 14.16, “Other helpful targets” for more information on this target.
If you have used any of the *-dirs packages, as explained
in Section 10.8,
“Sharing directories between packages”, you
may have noticed that make
print-PLIST outputs a set of @comments instead of real @dirrm lines. You can also do this for
specific directories and files, so that the results of that
command are very close to reality. This helps a lot during the update of
packages.
The PRINT_PLIST_AWK variable
takes a set of AWK patterns and actions that are used to
filter the output of print-PLIST. You can append any chunk of AWK scripting
you like to it, but be careful with quoting.
For example, to get all files inside the libdata/foo directory removed from the
resulting PLIST:
PRINT_PLIST_AWK+= /^libdata\/foo/ { next; }
And to get all the @dirrm
lines referring to a specific (shared) directory converted to
@comments:
PRINT_PLIST_AWK+= /^@dirrm share\/specific/ { print "@comment " $$0; next; }
A number of variables are substituted automatically in PLISTs when a package is installed on a system. This includes the following variables:
${MACHINE_ARCH}, ${MACHINE_GNU_ARCH}Some packages like emacs and perl embed information
about which architecture they were built on into the
pathnames where they install their files. To handle
this case, PLIST will be preprocessed before actually
used, and the symbol “${MACHINE_ARCH}” will be
replaced by what uname
-p gives. The same is done if the
string ${MACHINE_GNU_ARCH}
is embedded in PLIST somewhere - use this on packages
that have GNU autoconf-created configure scripts.
There used to be a symbol “$ARCH” that was
replaced by the output of uname -m, but that's no
longer supported and has been removed.
${OPSYS}, ${LOWER_OPSYS}, ${OS_VERSION}Some packages want to embed the OS name and version
into some paths. To do this, use these variables in the
PLIST:
${OPSYS} - output
of “uname
-s”
${LOWER_OPSYS} -
lowercase common name (eg. “solaris”)
${OS_VERSION} -
“uname
-r”
${PKGLOCALEDIR}Packages that install locale files should list them
in the PLIST as “${PKGLOCALEDIR}/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/...”
instead of “share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/...”.
This properly handles the fact that different operating
systems expect locale files to be either in
share or lib by default.
For a complete list of values which are replaced by
default, please look in bsd.pkg.mk (and search for PLIST_SUBST).
If you want to change other variables not listed above,
you can add variables and their expansions to this variable
in the following way, similar to MESSAGE_SUBST (see Section 8.5, “Optional
files”):
PLIST_SUBST+= SOMEVAR="somevalue"
This replaces all occurrences of “${SOMEVAR}” in the PLIST with “somevalue”.
Man pages should be installed in compressed form if
MANZ is set (in bsd.own.mk), and uncompressed otherwise. To
handle this in the PLIST file, the suffix “.gz” is appended/removed automatically
for man pages according to MANZ
and MANCOMPRESSED being set or
not, see above for details. This modification of the
PLIST file is done on a copy of it, not
PLIST itself.
To use one or more files as source for the PLIST used in generating the binary
package, set the variable PLIST_SRC to the names of that file(s). The
files are later concatenated using
cat(1), and
order of things is important.
Some packages decide to install a different set of files based on the operating system being used. These differences can be automatically handled by using the following files:
PLIST.common
PLIST.${OPSYS}
PLIST.${MACHINE_ARCH}
PLIST.${OPSYS}-${MACHINE_ARCH}
PLIST.common_end
A “shared directory” is a directory where multiple (and unrelated) packages install files. These directories are problematic because you have to add special tricks in the PLIST to conditionally remove them, or have some centralized package handle them.
Within pkgsrc, you'll find both approaches. If a directory is shared by a few unrelated packages, it's often not worth to add an extra package to remove it. Therefore, one simply does:
@unexec ${RMDIR} %D/path/to/shared/directory 2>/dev/null || ${TRUE}
in the PLISTs of all affected packages, instead of the regular "@dirrm" line.
However, if the directory is shared across many packages, two different solutions are available:
If the packages have a common dependency, the
directory can be removed in that. For example, see
textproc/scrollkeeper, which
removes the shared directory share/omf.
If the packages using the directory are not related at all (they have no common dependencies), a *-dirs package is used.
From now on, we'll discuss the second solution. To get an idea of the *-dirs packages available, issue:
% cd .../pkgsrc
% ls -d */*-dirs
Their use from other packages is very simple. The
USE_DIRS variable takes a list
of package names (without the “-dirs” part) together with the required
version number (always pick the latest one when writing new
packages).
For example, if a package installs files under
share/applications, it should have the
following line in it:
USE_DIRS+= xdg-1.1
After regenerating the PLIST using make print-PLIST, you should get the right (commented out) lines.
Note that even if your package is using $X11BASE, it must not depend on the
*-x11-dirs packages. Just specify the name without that part
and pkgsrc (in particular, mk/dirs.mk) will take care of it.