v0.1.5, Preparing for v0.2.0rc0

Hi there!

I've tagged v0.1.5 with the changes that happened since the last release and pushed it to the main branch.

I'll soon merge my oversized Kupferbootstrap and PKGBUILDs merge requests into dev; somewhere between the evenings (CET) of Thursday (2022-11-10) and Friday (2022-11-11).

As they will form the basis for v0.2.0, I will be calling them v0.2.0rc0.

I'm announcing this early to give people some time to migrate to main before blindly updating themselves into half a dev installation.

We'll both show you how to migrate to main in order to stay on v0.1.5 and give you a preview of what's new in v0.2.0rc0, right after the usual release notes for v0.1.5.

Kupfer v0.1.5#

Kernel 6.0, phosh was rebuilt since gnome got updated to 43, phosh-mobile-configs got packaged by Syboxez!

kupferbootstrap#

kupferbootstrap v0.1.5

Literally no changes.

PKGBUILDS#

pkgbuilds v0.1.5

• phosh/phosh-mobile-settings: New package
• linux/sdm845: Update to 6.0.3
• linux/msm8916: Update to 6.0.2: Looking for testers! If you have a bq paella, contact us on Matrix!
• bumped pkgver for phoc and phosh and phosh-osk-stub: Rebuild against Gnome 43.

Thanks to Syboxez for packaging phosh-mobile-settings and updating the kernels!

Migration Instructions#

So, without further ado, let me present you with your two options:

1. Don't want to be the victim of my development whims so much? Want to postpone the migration pain until v0.2.0 is ready and fully released? Prefer smooth-ish sailing? Understandable.
   You can stay on v0.1.x for now by switching to the main branch (if you're unsure, read the linked instructions on how to change branches - you'll see what you have). You can already do this today, before v0.2.0rc0 hits dev!
2. Or: Take a ride, experience and test the new Kupfer(bootstrap) with us. Unlike previous versions, updating will require some manual interventions.
   If you're up for it, wait for the release blog post with the migration instructions for v0.2rc0 in the next two days.
   Sidenote: After v0.2.0 (proper) is released to main, you will have to do this anyway, but more things might change along the way; dev is short for development after all.

Migrating to the main branch#

Updating to v0.1.5 is as easy as switching to the newest version of the main branch in both kupferbootstrap.git and pkgbuilds.git.

Step by step:

1. Open a terminal.
2. Edit your config file:
   1. Open your config file with your favourite editor, e.g. nano ~/.config/kupfer/kupferbootstrap.toml.
      If that file doesn't exist or is empty for some reason, run kupferbootstrap config init -N now and reopen the file.
      It should contain the default values now.
   2. In the [pkgbuilds] section, set git_branch to "main"
   3. in the [pacman] section, set repo_branch to "main"

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7

      [pkgbuilds] ... git_branch = "main" [pacman] ... repo_branch = "main"

3. Change directory (cd) into your kupferbootstrap directory, then run the following commands:

   1 2 3

   git remote update git switch -f main git reset --hard origin/main

4. Make sure all the python dependencies from requirements.txt are installed. Either consult the AUR or [create a venv and] run pip install -r requirements.txt
5. Change directory into your pkgbuilds directory (~/.cache/kupfer/pkgbuilds by default) and run the commands from the last step here too.
6. If all of that succeeded, back up and regenerate your config, just in case: cp ~/.config/kupfer/kupferbootstrap.toml{,.premigration} && kupferbootstrap config init -N

Migrating your existing phone installation to main#

On your device, edit your pacman.conf, e.g. sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf, best done from a PC with SSH.

1. Ensure your Kupfer repos towards the end of the file are pointing at /main/, not /dev/, like so:

   1 2	[boot] Server = https://gitlab.com/kupfer/packages/prebuilts/-/raw/main/$arch/$repo

   Change this for all the Kupfer repos.

2. After making it so, upgrade your system with pacman -Syu. You should be done.

What's new in v0.2rc0#

Here's the major changes you can look forward to, off the top of my head:

• KBS now runs as the correct uid instead of root and uses sudo to escalate when necessary. This mostly means that pkgbuilds.git will now be usable with regular git, inside and outside of Docker, also from your regular terminal.
• Speaking of Docker: kupferbootstrap now works well without the Docker wrapper on Arch Linux hosts, with one little caveat: it might install qemu-user-static and binfmt-qemu on your host.
  • While I'm not gonna guarantee that it's not gonna eat your house and burn down your homework, I use it without the wrapper a lot, and my filesystem is still here. It really speeds things up.
    You can either call KBS with the -W / --no-wrapper flag or set type = "none" in the [wrapper] section of your KBS config.
  • Using --no-wrapper also makes the net ssh and packages sideload commands much more useful, since ssh-agent passthrough into Docker isn't implemented.
  • KBS is now a little more lax on what conditions have to be met before it wraps, in the interest of speed.
  • During development, I've found it helpful to also introduce the symmetrical -w / --force-wrapper flag to force KBS to wrap in docker even when it hasn't yet or wouldn't have decided that it needs to wrap.
• Package-parsing and -building has been updated a lot. It should be faster and smarter (about when building is needed) than ever.
  Over the last few months, KBS has learned:
  • how to download packages instead of building them if the right version is available
  • to cache the SRCINFO (.srcinfo_meta.json), because even a lot of parallel calls to makepkg --printsrcinfo take kinda long if you run them every. single. execution. of KBS.
  • to know whether it needs to prepare() sources or not (srcinfo_initialised.json)
  • how to parse and handle split packages properly
  • _mode= is no longer necessary to build a PKGBUILD, making it easier to locally drop in 3rd party PKGBUILDs. kupferbootstrap packages check will still fail on this though, so that we keep it explicit in our official Kupfer pkgbuilds.git.
  • similar to _mode=, we've introduced a new optional _nodeps=true option in PKGBUILDs, to mark a package only needs their makedepends during build time, speeding up builds of packages such as metapackages or configs.
• Devices and Flavours are no longer hardcoded into the KBS source code. They are now read from packages in the PKGBUILDs, which is a big part of the changes in pkgbuilds.git.
  • You can now print them with kupferbootstrap devices and Kupferbootstrap flavours respectively.
  • Attributes like the storage sector size are now parsed from the devices' deviceinfo file.
  • To enable systemd services for Flavours (and Devices, think ModemManager or qbootctl), we have introduced kupfer-config, a simple script to enable a bunch of services en masse, as specified by a number of packaged files, user overrideable. I'll write some more info on it in a future post.