This article is a summary of couple Gentoo Wiki articles that teaches how to get access to Gentoo’s GURU overlay and start creating your own ebuilds or maintain existing ones.
Disclaimer: I am not a Gentoo developer, and I just started interacting with Gentoo community and this is what I’ve learned so far. There are probably (definitely) better ways to do this, and I’ll be glad to hear suggestions.
Step 1: Request Access
This step is not mandatory if the goal is to create ebuilds locally
without pushing them to the repository. However, SSH access is required
to actually upload ebuilds to GURU repository. Since GURU is a community
project, anyone can request access via a bug in Gentoo bugzilla.
For example, this was my request: https://bugs.gentoo.org/899896
Required information:
- Real name
- public SSH key
It also might be helpful to create GPG key at this point.
Follow their guide
until Submit the new key to the keyserver section.
If everything was done correctly, there will be a set of GPG keys available on the system.
Step 2: Clone GURU
Starting from this point, everything will be done on a Gentoo Linux machine. GURU repository can be cloned without any authentication with:
git clone https://anongit.gentoo.org/git/repo/proj/guru.git
But this method has limitations. For example, it is not possible to make changes and push them to the repository. To be able to do that, SSH access (that was requested in Step 1) is required.
If the access was granted, add SSH and Gentoo git information to ~/.ssh/config:
Host git.gentoo.org
HostName git.gentoo.org
User git
IdentityFile /path/to/public/ssh-key
After that, git will know how to connect to Gentoo’s git server, and it will be possible to
clone GURU repository with authentication. Navigate to /var/db/repos and clone the GURU repository:
git clone -b dev git+ssh://[email protected]/repo/proj/guru.git
Step 3: Configure Local Repository
Now it’s time to tell Portage that a new repository exists. First, change GURU repository’s
ownership to portage:portage:
chown -R portage:portage /var/db/repos/guru
Then, add the following lines to /etc/portage/repos.conf/guru.conf:
[guru]
location = /var/db/repos/guru
Finally, test to see if ebuilds from the new repository are available:
emerge --ask dev-python/sendgrid
[ Small Tangent ]
Normally setting up local repo is a bit more complex than this.
Here are the steps to create a local repo named labbrat:
mkdir -p /var/db/repos/labbrat/{metadata,profiles}
chown -R portage:portage /var/db/repos/labbrat
echo 'labbrat' > /var/db/repos/labbrat/profiles/repo_name
echo -e 'masters = gentoo\nauto-sync = false' >> /var/db/repos/labbrat/metadata/layout.conf
echo -e '[labbrat]\nlocation = /var/db/repos/labbrat' >> /etc/portage/repos.conf/labbrat.conf
Then, to create an ebuild there:
mkdir -p /var/db/repos/labbrat/app-misc/your-app
cd /var/db/repos/labbrat/app-misc/your-app
vim your-app.ebuild # write an ebuild
ebuild your-app.ebuild manifest
And finally, install it!
emerge --ask app-misc/your-app
Step 4: Making Changes
To create your own ebuilds and change existing ones, a string list of settings must be applied to the repository git config. In the repo, run:
git config --local pull.ff only
git config --local pull.rebase merges
git config --local commit.gpgsign 1
git config --local push.gpgsign 1
git config --local user.name "Your Full Name"
git config --local user.email "[email protected]"
git config --local user.signingkey KEY-FINGERPRINT
To see which keys are available:
gpg --list-secret-keys --keyid-format=long
The KEY-FINGERPRINT is the signing GPG key ([S]) that was created in Step 0.
GURU repository does not verify the GPG key, but without it it’s not possible to push changes.
As the name suggests, this key will be used for signing commits, and to use it, run:
git commit -sS
The -s flag will add a Signed-off-by line to the commit message, and the -S flag will
sign the commit with the GPG key. Sometimes, especially when the GPG key has is password protected,
this error might pop up in the terminal:
# error: gpg: signing failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
To fix this, run:
export GPG_TTY=$(tty)