linux-packaging

This library lets you distribute your Lisp applications by linux packages for the following distributions:

• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Linux Mint
• (... and really any distribution using .deb packages)
• Arch Linux
• Manjaro Linux
• (... and really any distribution using .pkg packages)
• Fedora
• CentOS
• Red Hat
• (... and really any distribution using .rpm packages)

All you need to do is declaring this in your .asd:

(defsystem "foo-deb"
  :defsystem-depends-on ("linux-packaging")
  :class "linux-packaging:deb"
  :build-operation "linux-packaging:build-op"
  :depends-on ("foo")
  :package-name "foo"
  :version "1.0.0"
  :build-pathname "foo"
  :entry-point "foo:main")

Compile with sbcl --eval '(asdf:make :foo-deb)', et voila.

What's even more cool? If your application relies on shared libraries, such as libsqlite, linux-packaging will automatically detect that and add the appropriate dependencies to your package. When your package will be installed, the appropriate dependencies will be installed alongside it, thanks to apt/dnf/yum/pacman/etc.

What's even more cool? If your application relies on CFFI grovel or wrapper files, such as the one built by osicat, those files will be statically embedded into your binary.

Both of those mean that you can write any Lisp application using CFFI, and your built packages will be installable by anyone using those distributions.

This is similar to what Deploy is doing. This library is doing great work, by the way. But the approach taken by linux-packaging is slightly different.

Deploy is essentially taking this approach:

• Dump an image of your Lisp application
• Find out the C libraries
• Copy everything into a folder
• Archive that folder

And the user has to somehow figure out how to "install" that archive.

linux-packaging is taking another approach:

• Statically link the C libraries that it can into the image of your Lisp application
• Detect the C shared libraries, and which linux package is providing them
• Build an installable package on any linux distribution

Installing your Lisp application then becomes a procedure that every user of your distribution already knows.

This is an approach that plays more nicely with how distributions typically want their packages to be: relying on shared libraries as much as possible, so that updating the shared library doesn't mean having to rebuild your application.

As opposed to Deploy, the downsides of linux-packaging are:

• You need to compile sbcl manually with the --with-sb-linkable-runtime option, as this is not a default option.
• You need to install fpm to build the package.
• You need to build the package for the distribution you need on said distribution. For example, if you want to distribute a .deb for Debian Buster, you need to build your .deb on a Debian Buster machine.

The last point can seem daunting, but is not actually so. See the .gitlab-ci.yml file of this repository for a couple of examples, but the gist of it is that Docker and friends make it easy.

Reference

This is a reference of all the available options that you can use your .asd file, as well as their description.

class

:class is actually a default ASDF attribute. It lets you define another class for the system definition. You need to pick one of those:

• linux-packaging:rpm: if you want to build a .rpm package
• linux-packaging:deb: if you want to build a .deb package
• linux-packaging:pacman: if you want to build a .pkg package

build-operation

:build-operation is another default ASDF attribute. You need to set it to linux-packaging:build-op.

author

:author is another default ASDF attribute, but it is used to define the package's author/maintainer.

description

:description is another default ASDF attribute, and is used to set the package's description.

license

:license is another default ASDF attribute, used to define the package's license as well.

version

:version is another default ASDF attribute. It defines the version of the package. If not specified, linux-packaging will try looking in the VERSION environment variable, or fallback to 1.0.0.

package-name

Defines the linux package name. If not specified, the system name is used. (In the example above, it would be foo-deb.)

homepage

Defines the homepage showing up in the package's description.

additional-files

If you want to provide files in addition to the Lisp image, such as icons, documentation, etc, you can specify an alist of this kind:

:additional-files (("file/path/during/build" . "folder/to/install/at/"))

Those can also be pathnames if you want to be more specific on the exact files/directories to use.

additional-dependencies

You may need to provide arbitrary dependencies to your packages; those can be provided in a list:

:additional-dependencies ("emacs")

License

MIT License.