Cygwin Package Contributor's Guide

This document is intended for people who post packages to sourceware.org, and thus need to make them available through the standard Cygwin setup program. This documents the syntax of the setup.hint file, the program that automatically generates it on a regular basis, the layout required for packages, and the related policies to ensure good behaviour from the setup.exe program.

Setup.exe depends on certain conventions being followed. If they are not followed, bad things may happen to the users of setup.exe. Where a convention can be ignored, should circumstances warrent, this document will specify that. Setup.exe has it's own homepage http://sourceware.org/cygwin-apps/setup.html. If you are interested in adding features to setup.exe, or in manually creating a setup.ini file, you should consult the setup.exe homepage.

The cygwin-apps mailing list is the correct place to discuss any package creation or maintenance issues. It is not a place for end user bug reports - direct those to the cygwin mailing list instead.

Contents

Package file naming

Package naming scheme: use the vendor's version plus a release suffix for ports of existing packages (i.e. bash 2.04 becomes 2.04-1, 2.04-2, etc, until bash 2.05 is ported, which would be 2.05-1, etc). Some packages also use a YYMMDD format for their versions, e.g. binutils-20010901-1.tar.bz2. The first release of a package should have a -1 release suffix.

A complete package currently consists of three files:

Binary tar files are named "package-version-release.tar.bz2". They generally contain the executable files that will be installed on a user's system plus any auxilliary files needed by the package. See the making packages section below for more details on how to generate a binary tar file.

Source tar files are named "package-version-release-src.tar.bz2". Source tar files should contain the source files needed to rebuild the package. While installing these files is optional under setup.exe, the inclusion of a source tar file is part of the totality that makes up a Cygwin package and so, these files are not optional. In some cases, there may be multiple packages generated from the same source; for instance, one might have a "boffo" package and its associate shared library in "libboffo7", where both are generated from the same -src tarball. See the making packages section below for more details on the contents of a -src tar file, and the setup.hint section for information on the "external-source:" option.

The setup.hint file is discussed below.

Automatic setup.ini generation on sourceware.org

A script runs on sourceware.org which collects information from (currently) the release directory in the ftp download area. Information from subdirectories of these directories is parsed to automatically generate the default setup.ini file which is used by the Cygwin setup.exe program for installation control. If you are responsible for maintaining a Cygwin package, it is important that you understand how this process works.

Packages are grouped by directory under release. The directory name is the same as the package name. For example, the boffo package will live in the boffo subdirectory. Exceptions to this rule are historical. All new packages will follow the rule of package name == directory name. However, for closely related groups of packages, it is acceptable to use a heirarchical tree under release/:

release/
release/boffo/
release/boffo/<boffo files>
release/boffo/boffo-devel/
release/boffo/boffo-devel/<boffo-devel file>

Each directory contains source and binary tar files which have been been compressed using bzip2. The required format of these filenames is: package-version-release[-src].tar.bz2 . The contents of these files is discussed below.

The "package" part of the filename is the name mentioned above.

The version number must start with a digit and must adhere to the rules in package file naming above. Higher version (and release) numbers are used for the current version of a package; the previous stable version (if any) is used for the previous version (however see setup.hint for exceptions to this rule). Lexically, when two packages have identical vendor version numbers, the one with the higher release number is considered newer. Also, given two packages, the one with the higher vendor version number is always considered newer, regardless of the release number.

The -src component of the filename is added to files which contain source code.

A complete "package" is made up of three files: the "binary" package tar file, the "source" tar file, and the "setup.hint" file, e.g.:

bash$ ls release/boffo
boffo-1.0-1.tar.bz2  boffo-1.0-1-src.tar.bz2  setup.hint

Setup is currently unable to list more than three versions of each package. Therefore you should not keep more than three versions of each package around: The current version, the previous stable version, and, optionally, one test version. By keeping a previous stable version around, you isolate yourself (somewhat) from problems with partial mirrors. When you add a new "current" version, you can either keep the old "previous" version, or make the old current version the new previous version, depending on how stable they each were.

Test versions are specified via the setup.hint file as described below. It is not required that your package have a test version. Use of a test version of a package is at the discretion of the package maintainer.

Note that currently some files in the distribution are gzipped. Use of gzip for file compression is deprecated, however. New package submissions must be bzip2'ed.

setup.hint

Each package must be submitted with a file called setup.hint. This file is used for information that cannot be inferred just from the context of the file name or package name. Lines in setup.hint will consist of one of the following:

# comment
@ package
sdesc: "some text"
ldesc: "some text"
skip:
curr: version
prev: version
test: version
category: name1[ name2...]
requires: package[ package...]
external-source: package

Note: Not all of the above setup.hint lines are required. Please read the description below for further details on how to construct a setup.hint file.

(You may see some older setup.hint files which lack the colons after the introducing field. This usage is allowed but deprecated. Please use colons in your setup.hint for everything but '#' and "@'.)

Lines that begin with '#' are considered to be comments and are ignored by the setup.ini generator.

A line that begins with a "@" behaves similarly to the setup.ini field (see below). It overrides the package name for the enclosing directory. This is an optional entry. It is intended only for historical packages where the package name is different from the name of the directory in which the package resides. This should not be necessary for "modern" setup.hint files. Do not use this unless you've been instructed to do so.

The curr, prev, and test lines indicate which versions should be used for which sections of that package. Use these settings only if you need to circumvent the normal intuitive version numbering scheme.

Use of curr and prev is usually not required since the setup.ini generator does a good job of figuring out version number ordering. So, e.g. if you had previously released boffo-0.9-1 and now have a new boffo-1.0-1, the version numbering is obvious and there is no need to use curr or prev. It is obvious that boffo-1.0-1 is newer than boffo-0.9-1 and the setup.ini generator will do the right thing in this case.

However, if you had discovered a serious error in the boffo-1.0 release, and then decided that you want to drop back to boffo-0.9-1, you could include entries like this:

prev: 1.0-1
curr: 0.9-1

In general, you should trust the automatic setup.ini generator to "do the right thing" -- with one exception. If you decide that you need to release a test version of your package, there is no way for the setup.ini generator to know that.

So, you will have to put something like "test: 1.9-1" in your setup.hint file. This will cause setup.exe to characterize the 1.9-1 version as a "test" package. With the current setup.exe implementation, it will also mean that it will be overlooked by most people during installation. So, unless you have made arrangements to advertise your test release, this option should be used sparingly.

Note that if any of the curr, prev, or test options are used, they will short circuit all of the automatic version detection used for generating setup.ini. So, if you include a test option, and you have valid current and/or previous tar files, you must specify curr and/or prev. Otherwise, the only version that setup.exe will display will be the test version.

For example, if your setup.hint looks like this:

test: 1.9-1

then setup.ini will not contain the 0.9-1 or 1.0-1 versions.

If you want all of the versions included, you must do this:

prev: 0.9-1
curr: 1.0-1
test: 1.9-1

The skip line indicates that that package should not appear in setup.ini. It is intended for directories that exist in the hierarchy that should not be considered for inclusion in setup.ini.

sdesc is a mandatory field for setup.hint. Your package must contain this field. The sdesc field is required for correct operation of setup.exe.

sdesc is a one line description of the package. This is the information that will be displayed when installing packages via setup.exe.

ldesc is a more descriptive, multi-line description of the package, intended for future use in setup.exe.

Please note that the package name should not be part of the description, e.g. this is incorrect:

sdesc:      "boffo: A whackamole simulation in ASCII art"

This is correct:

sdesc:      "A whackamole simulation in ASCII art"

Quote text that takes up several lines e.g.:

ldesc: "A whackamole simulation in ASCII art.
Intended for use on VT100 terminals at BAUD rates 1200 and
above.  Uses arrow keys for positioning over moles.  Space
bar whacks the mole.
No actual moles will be harmed during execution of this game."

The category line indicates the categories that this package belongs to. One package can belong to multiple categories. Multiple categories are separated by spaces.

Do not enclose multiple category names within quotation marks.

Please do not invent a new category without checking with the cygwin-apps mailing list first. As of this writing, the current categories are:

As you can see, currently, all categories consist of only a single word. We don't anticipate that this will change anytime soon. However, with the use of quotes, setup.exe will understand category names which contain spaces, for example:

category: "ASCII Games"

The above would place a package in a single category called "ASCII Games" rather than two categories "ASCII" and "Games".

The requires line indicates the packages that this package relies on. If your package is dependent on a file provided by another package that other package should be included here. The requires field may be missing or empty if your package truly does not require any other package.

A package can rely on multiple other packages. Hierarchical dependencies should work correctly, however, it is best to always include specific dependencies, i.e. don't drop 'bar' from your dependency list if your package requires it, even if you are including 'foo' which relies on 'bar'.

Conversely, do not include package dependencies of dependent packages in your dependency list. If you think that another package has an incorrect dependency list, send email to cygwin-apps noting that fact.

Multiple packages are separated by spaces. Do not enclose multiple package names within quotation marks.

Here's an example of a complete release/boffo/setup.hint:

category: Games Text
requires: libncurses6 cygwin
sdesc:    "A whackamole simulation in ASCII art"
ldesc:    "A whackamole simulation in ASCII art.
Intended for use on VT100 terminals at BAUD rates 1200 and
above.  Uses arrow keys for positioning over moles.  Space
bar whacks the mole.
No actual moles will be harmed during execution of this game."

Notice that we didn't use the prev, curr, test, or @ options. Instead, we relied on the automatic setup.ini generator to do as much as possible for us.

setup.hint (Advanced Options)

The external-source line is used when multiple installation packages are generated from a single -src package. For example, suppose the boffo package contains the executables and documentation for boffo, but there is also a shared library cygboffo-7.dll that might be used by other packages; say, the fobbo program. It would be nice to separate that cygboffo-7.dll shared library into a second installation package, so that users of the fobbo program can install just the library, and not the entire boffo package. However, all of the boffo executables and the DLL are generated from the same source. To support this usage, the boffo maintainer would create three packages:

boffo-2.4.1-2.tar.bz2, boffo-2.4.1-2-src.tar.bz2, and the boffo setup.hint would go into the release/boffo/ subdirectory on the Cygwin server. libboffo7-2.4.1-2.tar.bz2 would go into a separate subdirectory, such as release/boffo/libboffo7/, along with a separate libboffo7 setup.hint. The two setup.hint files would look something like this:

The setup.ini generated from these setup.hint files will include these lines (only relevant lines shown):

@ boffo
requires: libboffo7 libncurses6 cygwin
version: 2.4.1-2
install: release/boffo/boffo-2.4.1-2.tar.bz2
source: release/boffo/boffo-2.4.1-2-src.tar.bz2
@ libboffo7
requires: cygwin
version: 2.4.1-2
install: release/boffo/libboffo7/libboffo7-2.4.1-2.tar.bz2
source: release/boffo/boffo-2.4.1-2-src.tar.bz2

Note that both packages point to the same -src tarball. Also, it is required that the version strings match (libboffo7-5.2 won't point to boffo-1.4-src). The same logic is used to "match up" prev: and test: versions.

Making Packages

The files paths within both the -src and the binary package files are quite important. Since setup.exe extracts into a predetermined directory, you must structure your package contents accordingly.

The following requirements avoid problems that have occured in the past with packages. Thus only skip them if you *know* your package will not recreate that prior problem.

usr/bin/boffo.exe
usr/share/boffo/boffo.dat
etc...

--prefix=/usr
--sysconfdir=/etc
--libexecdir=/usr/lib
--localstatedir=/var
--datadir=/usr/share
--mandir=/usr/share/man
--infodir=/usr/share/info

Package Source

There are three accepted ways to package the source code for Cygwin packages.

Method One

boffo-1.0-1/Makefile.in
boffo-1.0-1/README
boffo-1.0-1/configure
boffo-1.0-1/configure.in
etc...

boffo-1.0-1/README
boffo-1.0-1/configure
boffo-1.0-1/CYGWIN-PATCHES/boffo-1.0-1.patch
etc...

boffo-1.0-1.patch
boffo-1.0-1/README
boffo-1.0-1/configure
etc...

diff -Nrup vendor-src-dir patched-src-dir > foo-vendor-release.patch

patch -R -p1 < ../foo-vendor-release.patch

boffo-1.0-1.patch
boffo-1.0-1/README
boffo-1.0-1/configure
boffo-1.0-1/configure.in
boffo-1.0-1/Makefile.am
boffo-1.0-1/Makefile.in
boffo-1.0-1/boffo.c
...
boffo-1.0-1/CYGWIN-PATCHES/boffo.README (Cygwin-specific)
boffo-1.0-1/CYGWIN-PATCHES/setup.hint
...

Method Two

This method is sometimes referred to as the "g-b-s" method, after the filename of the generic-build-script template.

cd /tmp
tar xvjf ~/sources/boffo-1.0-1-src.tar.bz2

./boffo-1.0-1.sh all

Method Three: cygport

The technique of method two became popular to many maintainers, however it suffers from a number of drawbacks when applied on a wide scale. The cygport README explains a number of these problems.

The cygport framework is a response to these issues, and borrows concepts from the Gentoo portage system. It separates the g-b-s into a small file containing the package-specific parts and moves the main script infrastructure into shared files. For more information on using cygport consult the documentation and sample port files.

Source packages created with cygport have a similar structure to those created with method two, except that they contain a 'boffo-1.0-1.cygport' file in place of the 'boffo-1.0-1.sh' script. The binary package is built by running 'cygport boffo-1.0-1 all' instead of './boffo-1.0-1.sh all', and so on for prep, compile, package, finish, etc.

Creating a package postinstall script

If your package requires certain commands to be executed after the files in the package are installed, include them in a file in the package called /etc/postinstall/package.sh or /etc/postinstall/package.bat.

If the file's name ends in ".sh", it is executed with the Cygwin shell; if it ends in ".bat", it is executed with the DOS command interpreter. If it doesn't end with either of these suffixes, it is ignored.

After the script has been run it is renamed by appending the suffix ".done" to its previous name, to prevent it from being run again the next time the user runs the setup program.

Note that the setup program runs all the postinstall scripts after all desired packages have been installed, that is, it does not run each package's postinstall script immediately after installing that package. Note, furthermore, that the order in which the scripts are run is not guaranteed. Therefore, if your package depends on others which have their own postinstall scripts, you cannot assume in your script that the other packages' scripts have already been run.

Submitting a new package

So you've got a package you want to submit. Follow the following checklist before emailing the cygwin-apps mailing list and you'll almost certainly save time.

Package acceptation

Updating a package

So you've got an updated package you want to submit. Follow the following checklist before emailing the cygwin-apps mailing list and you'll almost certainly save time.

NOTE: On any major version upgrade, you may want to mark the release as Test.

Example announcement