v0.2.0-rc0 merged to dev

What is up, people of the multiverse?

I've merged Kupferbootstrap and PKGBUILDs merge requests into dev!

I consider this v0.2.0rc0.

This release will take some manual intervention to update!

The eagle-eyed among you might spot some barely edited paragraphs from the last post in here.

Coming up: both how to migrate to main to stay on v0.1.5 and how to migrate to dev for the new v0.2.0rc0.

What's in v0.2rc0#

• 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 up some more info on it in a future post.
• slightly cleaned up CLI
• Wrote unit tests and enabled CI* for everyone (meaning forks)

* on gitlab.com public CI runners (flaky) or bring your own runner (preferred)

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? 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).
2. Or: Take a ride, experience and test the new Kupfer(bootstrap) with us. Unlike previous versions, updating will require some manual interventions.
   After v0.2.0 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.
   If you're up for it, follow the migration instructions for v0.2rc0 below.

v0.1.5 - main branch#

If you want to remain on v0.1.5 for now, just follow the instructions in the last blog post

v0.2rc0 - dev branch#

Once v0.2rc0 has hit dev, the procedure for updating is similar, however, you should take some steps first:

1. Open a terminal.
2. Clear src/ and pkg/ dirs from outdated PKGBUILDs:
   sudo rm -rf ~/.cache/kupfer/pkgbuilds/*/*/{src,pkg}
3. Kupferbootstrap tries to do as little as necessary as root (even inside docker) now.
   Hence we'll need to fix some ownership issues, i.e. chown some things to your normal user and group:
   sudo chown -R "$(whoami):$(id -g)" ~/.cache/kupfer/{packages,images,jumpdrive,pkgbuilds}
4. 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 "dev"
   3. in the [pacman] section, set repo_branch to "dev"

      1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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

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

   1 2 3

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

6. 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
7. Change directory into your pkgbuilds directory (~/.cache/kupfer/pkgbuilds by default) and run the commands from the last step here too.

8. If all of that succeeded, back up and regenerate your config, just in case: cp ~/.config/kupfer/kupferbootstrap.toml{,.premigration} && kupferbootstrap config init -N

9. Run kupferbootstrap packages update --discard-changes.
   Your repository should be on the dev branch and already up to date.

Migrating your existing phone installation to v0.2rc0#

1. On your device, edit your pacman.conf, e.g. sudo nano /etc/pacman.conf, best done from a PC with SSH.
   Ensure your Kupfer repos towards the end of the file are pointing at /dev/, not /main/, like so:

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

   Change this for all the Kupfer repos.
2. Update the system and install kupfer-config: sudo pacman -Syu kupfer-config.
3. Depending on your flavour, you might also want to install either flavour-barebone, flavour-debug-shell, flavour-phosh, or flavour-gnome.
4. Enable services: sudo kupfer-config apply. New since rc2: Also run sudo kupfer-config --user apply
5. If all commands succeeded, reboot.

It should be as simple as that. Yes, really.