Gentoo Development Guide

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Variables

There are a number of special variables which must be set in ebuilds, and many more which can optionally be specified. There are also some predefined variables which are of use throughout the ebuild.

Predefined Read-Only Variables

The following variables are defined for you. You must not attempt to set them.

Variable Purpose
P Package name and version (excluding revision, if any), for example vim-6.3.
PN Package name, for example vim.
PV Package version (excluding revision, if any), for example 6.3. It should reflect the upstream versioning scheme.
PR Package revision, or r0 if no revision exists.
PVR Package version and revision (if any), for example 6.3, 6.3-r1.
PF Full package name, ${PN}-${PVR}, for example vim-6.3-r1.
A All the source files for the package (excluding those which are not available because of USE flags).
CATEGORY Package's category, for example app-editors.
FILESDIR Path to the ebuild's files/ directory, commonly used for small patches and files. Value: "${PORTDIR}/${CATEGORY}/${PN}/files".
WORKDIR Path to the ebuild's root build directory. Value: "${PORTAGE_BUILDDIR}/work".
T Path to a temporary directory which may be used by the ebuild. Value: "${PORTAGE_BUILDDIR}/temp".
D Path to the temporary install directory. Value: "${PORTAGE_BUILDDIR}/image".
ROOT Path to the root directory. When not using ${D}, always prepend ${ROOT} to the path.
DISTDIR Contains the path to the directory where all the files fetched for the package are stored.

Ebuild-defined Variables

The following variables may or must be defined by every ebuild.

Variable Purpose
EAPI The EAPI. See EAPI Usage and Description.
DESCRIPTION A short (less than 80 characters) description of the package's purpose. Mandatory.
HOMEPAGE Package's homepage. Mandatory (except for virtuals). If you are unable to locate an official one, try to provide a link to freshmeat.net or a similar package tracking site. Never refer to a variable name in the string; include only raw text.
SRC_URI A list of source URIs for the package. Can contain USE-conditional parts, see SRC_URI.
LICENSE The package's license, corresponding exactly (including case) to a file in licenses/. Mandatory (except for virtuals). See LICENSE.
SLOT The package's SLOT. Mandatory. See SLOT.
KEYWORDS See KEYWORDS and Keywording.
IUSE A list of all USE flags (excluding arch flags, but including USE_EXPAND flags) used within the ebuild. See IUSE.
REQUIRED_USE A list of assertions that must be met by the configuration of USE flags to be valid for this ebuild. (Requires EAPI>=4.)
RESTRICT A space-delimited list of portage features to restrict. Valid values are fetch, mirror, strip, test and userpriv. See man 5 ebuild for details.
DEPEND A list of the package's build dependencies. See Dependencies.
RDEPEND A list of the package's runtime dependencies. See Dependencies.
PDEPEND A list of packages to be installed after the package is merged. Should only be used where RDEPEND is not possible. See Dependencies.
S Path to the temporary build directory, used by src_compile and src_install. Default: "${WORKDIR}/${P}". Ebuilds should not provide a value for this variable if it is the same as the default value.
PROPERTIES A space-delimited list of properties, with conditional syntax support. interactive is the only valid value for now.
DOCS An array or space-delimited list of documentation files for the default src_install function to install using dodoc. If undefined, a reasonable default list is used. (Requires EAPI>=4.)

SLOT

When slots are not needed, use SLOT="0". Do not use SLOT="", as this will disable slotting for this package.

See Slotting for more information on this variable.

KEYWORDS

The only valid construct involving a * inside KEYWORDS is a -*. Do not use KEYWORDS="*" or KEYWORDS="~*".

See Keywording for how to handle this variable.

SRC_URI

Conditional Sources

Conditional source files based upon USE flags are allowed using the usual flag? ( ) syntax. This is often useful for arch-specific code or for binary packages — downloading sparc binaries on ppc would be a waste of bandwidth. 

SRC_URI="http://example.com/files/${P}-core.tar.bz2
    x86?   ( http://example.com/files/${P}/${P}-sse-asm.tar.bz2 )
    ppc?   ( http://example.com/files/${P}/${P}-vmx-asm.tar.bz2 )
    sparc? ( http://example.com/files/${P}/${P}-vis-asm.tar.bz2 )
    doc?   ( http://example.com/files/${P}/${P}-docs.tar.bz2 )"

If a USE_EXPAND variable is used to control whether certain optional components are installed, the correct thing to do if the variable is unset is generally to install all available components. 

SRC_URI="http://example.com/files/${P}-core.tar.bz2
        examplecards_foo?  ( http://example.com/files/${P}-foo.tar.bz2 )
        examplecards_bar?  ( http://example.com/files/${P}-bar.tar.bz2 )
        examplecards_baz?  ( http://example.com/files/${P}-baz.tar.bz2 )
        !examplecards_foo? ( !examplecards_bar? ( !examplecards_baz? (
            http://example.com/files/${P}-foo.tar.bz2
            http://example.com/files/${P}-bar.tar.bz2
            http://example.com/files/${P}-baz.tar.bz2 ) ) )"

IUSE

Note that the IUSE variable is cumulative, so there is no need to specify USE flags used only within inherited eclasses within the ebuild's IUSE.

Note

You need not assign the IUSE variable in your ebuild if it is empty.

Arch USE flags (sparc, mips, x86-fbsd and so on) should not be listed.

LICENSE

It is possible to specify multiple LICENSE entries, and entries which only apply if a particular USE flag is set. The format is the same as for DEPEND. See GLEP 23 for details.

Version and Name Formatting Issues

Often upstream's tarball versioning or naming format doesn't quite follow Gentoo conventions. Using capital letters in names or differences in how underscores and hyphens are used in versions are particularly common. For example, what Gentoo calls foo-1.2.3b may be expecting a tarball named Foo-1.2-3b.tar.bz2. Rather than hard coding the package string, it is preferable to make MY_PN, MY_PV and MY_P variables and use those to define the upstream naming. The easy way of redefining the version, which should be used unless you are sure you know what you are doing, is to use the versionator eclass: 

inherit versionator
MY_PN="Foo"
MY_PV=$(replace_version_separator 2 '-')
MY_P="${MY_PN}-${MY_PV}"

This code has the advantage that it will carry on working even if upstream switches to a format like Foo-1.3-4.5.tar.bz2 (yes, this really happens).

It is also possible to use bash substitution to achieve the same effect (this is how versionator works internally), but this is complicated, error prone and hard to read.

Some ebuilds use calls to sed, awk and / or cut to do this. This must not be done for any new code, and should be fixed to use either versionator or bash substitution where possible. Global scope non-bash code is highly discouraged.

The versionator eclass can also be used to extract particular components from a version string. See man versionator.eclass and the eclass source code for further documentation and examples. A brief summary of the functions follows.

Function Purpose
get_all_version_components Split up a version string into its component parts.
get_version_components Get important version components, excluding '.', '-' and '_'.
get_major_version Get the major version.
get_version_component_range Extract a range of subparts from a version string.
get_after_major_version Get everything after the major version.
replace_version_separator Replace a particular version separator.
replace_all_version_separators Replace all version separators.
delete_version_separator Delete a version separator.
delete_all_version_separators Delete all version separators.
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