After looking at how cool mxcl/homebrew is and thinking of how much of an Archlinux PKGBUILD is background-noise, here is a proof-of-concept project. This is really just a fancy templating system for PKGBUILDs. In theory it could be able to generate an .install file too.

Imagine instead of using bash for PKGBUILDs, you could use Lua. One great thing about Lua (where it most obviously outshines other languages) is how easy it is to sandbox Lua. You can even undefine "standard" functions. It's great! Now you can be confident that PKGBUILDs are not malicious... because you've basically castrated them...

Homebrew for Mac OS X is awesome because it uses ruby code for declaring often tedious things. I wanted something similar. By using higher level programming (compared to bash (which is not very difficult)) you can also generate sane defaults.

So for example, instead of copy/pasting your "configure" command and then editing some more options onto it, instead you only have to specify the options that you want added to the defaults:

configure { bindir = "/usr/bin" }

Here, configure is really a Lua function, and the curly brackets surround a table. Your table is added to an internal Cmd object that keeps track of what arguments are passed to it. That doesn't matter though, just keep this in mind:

Interally, configure already has "--prefix=/usr" as an argument because this is so common why bother repeating it? The line of DSL above just adds more named parameters, in the end the command data converts into the string:

configure --prefix=/usr --bindir="/usr/bin"

For some reason I spent alot of time on this today. I thought it would be alot quicker. Right now it works for the most part. There is only a RecipeClass for GNU Autotools style packages. Look at the examples under the ex/ folder. Try running makepkgbuild with the filenames under ex as arguments to print out the PKGBUILDs.

Nothing too fancy, really. Just a neat idea I stole from homebrew.