VABS: Versioned Arch Build System & vpack helper

Question

What is it?
vABS is an addition to ABS that has as main goal to keep different versions of the official PKGBUILDs. In ABS you have the latest versions of PKGBUILDs, while in vABS you also have old versions.
What is it used for?
vABS is very useful to downgrade packages. Sometimes it happens that a new package brings some bug and you want to return to the previous version until the bug is solved, but for that you need to have the old package in the local pacman cache or in the repositories, but its cache may have been deleted and the package may have come out of the archives. An alternative would be to edit the latest PKGBUILD available in ABS, which can be tricky because some files may not work with older versions, such as patches, etc. Another way would be to download the files via SVN, which is not so practical, although it works very well.
How to use it?
Its use is very simple. Access vabs.archlinux-br.org, choose your architecture, navigate to the directory that contains the desired version of your package and download the tgz file, which contains all the files you need to compile the package. Then just unpack the tarball and compile the package with makepkg, then install with pacman -U package.tar.xz.
You can also use vpack, which is a vABS helper that makes the package building an even simpler process.
vpack is available on AUR: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=51856
PS: Git support was dropped due to space issues on GitHub. You should use vpack instead.
Contact
vabsΘarchlinux-br·org.
Hope you like it, thanks.
Last edited by estevao (2011-09-08 05:43:58)

Answer 1

fsckd wrote:
Useful project! Some questions,
Any chances of including source material with the archives?
Planning on pulling stuff from SVN and filling in your missing history?
GSF1200S wrote:using Links to navigate to the arm for a package
You can use pacman with ARM.
Yeah, I guess I had been doing it the hard way. You can put the ARM server in there and just change the date back, or you can use the Downgrade script from the AUR which allows you to downgrade to multiple different versions of a package (using ARM and local cache)- Im sure you already know this, but I didnt vABS is awesome because you can use diff patches to fix things (especially useful with the kernel).
Estevao: its not a huge deal, and if its going to be at all difficult to implement or any more than a few lines of code, forget it. I only suggested this to make diff patching easier and to have greater access to the source and PKGBUILD (which is already editable by vpack). However, this was also before I realized it listed the build directory plain as day- its just a matter of opening a file manager, then clicking a few folders until youre at the build directory. An example is the recent problem I had with my webcam- it required linux to be built with a patch run against it to disable USB autosuspend for my webcam (else id sound like a chipmunk). I was thinking of vpack launching a file manager for the sake of making the patching process easier- since from that file manager I can launch terminals to check md5sums of the source and patch file, run makepkg -s directly from the terminal, etc.
Really, thinking more about it, I disagree with my earlier self- I dont think one downgrades enough to warrant complicating vpacks code. vpack is good enough
Last edited by GSF1200S (2011-09-11 22:18:54)