Where have you been my whole life?

For the six months or so I’ve been tapping away with Crux Linux, smushing together my own Pkgfiles from Arch versions, I wished there was an easier way to do it.

Lucky me, Colin Zheng came up with a script that does most of the preliminary conversion automatically, and submitted it to the Crux mailing list yesterday.

Download, save, make executable if need be. Import all the relevant Arch materials from the package repositories and run the script. You should end up with a clean Pkgfile that is a fairly close translation to the original PKGBUILD, just in Crux-speak.

It will still need a little fine-tuning, and I don’t think I would just build anything arbitrarily from a new Pkgfile without double-checking all the touchy points. I’ve tested one or two of the packages I use frequently that aren’t in the Crux repos, and the results are usually close to my own Frankenstein creations … if not better.

And both pkgmk and pkgadd seem happy, which makes me happy. 😀

Thanks to Colin for making things just a little bit easier.