Structure

A repo contains:

Packages (.mpf)
Package signatures (.mpf.sig)
Repo metadata
Package list

Package Files and Signatures

MatterLinux repos contain at least two package. Each package also has a PGP signature that can be used to verify the package. These signatures belong to public key fingerprint specified in the repo metadata.

Repo Metadata

Repo metadata contains information about the repo itself. Such as the repo name, author and the public key used to sign the packages.

This metadata can be found in the repo file at the root of the repo. For example the repo metadata for https://pkgs.matterlinux.xyz/base is located at https://pkgs.matterlinux.xyz/base/repo. INI format is used for this metadata file.

Package List

A list containing all packages and all the package metadata can be found in an archive file named after the repo. For example the package list for https://pkgs.matterlinux.xyz/base is located at https://pkgs.matterlinux.xyz/base/base.tar.gz.

This archive file contains a file named pkgs, which contains repo package list in the INI format. It contains the package names, descriptions, versions, sums and dependencies.

Repo Source

Source for a repo has a simple structure that also contains all the source files for the packages. For example lets take a look the structure of the base repo source:

├── dist
│   ├── acl_2.3.1.mpf
│   ├── acl_2.3.1.mpf.sig
│   ├── base.tar.gz
│   ...
│   ├── repo
│   ├── sed_4.9.mpf
│   ├── sed_4.9.mpf.sig
│   ...
├── LICENSE.txt
├── README.md
├── repo.sh
├── sign-dist.sh
└── src
    ├── acl
    │   └── pkg.sh
    ├── attr
    │   └── pkg.sh
    ├── autoconf
    │   └── pkg.sh
    ├── automake
    │   └── pkg.sh
    ├── bash
    │   ├── pkg.sh
    │   ├── skelprof
    │   └── skelrc
    ...

Let's break this down:

LICENSE.txt: License used for the repo. All the packages in the repo should use a license compatible with this license.
README.md: README file. Contains a small description about the repo.
repo.sh: Repo script contains information about the repo, later used to build the repo metadata.
src: Contains package sources (package scripts, extra patches, configuration files etc.)
dist: Contains the compiled (built) packages.
sign-dist.sh: An extra shell script that you can find in the official repos. It is just a small script that is used to sign all the packages in the dist directory if they are built without the signatures.

Usage

MatterLinux provides 2 different official repos:

base: Contains base system packages such as glibc, systemd, linux etc.
desktop: Additional packages users may want to install for a more ideal desktop system.

This repos can provide packages for users, these packages can be managed using the MatterLinux Package Manager (mp). For more information see the page for package management.

Building an already existing repo

To build an already existing repo, such as the base or the desktop repo, first you will need to download the repos source. Source for the base and the desktop repo can be found on MatterLinux Git Server.

After downloading the repo source, you will need to install the mp-repo tool, which is the tool used for building MatterLinux repos. To do so please follow the steps here.

Finally to build the repo:

mp-repo <repo dir>

You will mostly likely want to disable package signing though, as you are probably not the owner of the repo:

mp-repo --no-sign <repo dir>

Creating a new repo

If you want to create an unofficial repo, setup the folder structure for the source repo as explained above. Then create a repo script, you can copy one from the official repos and edit it.

After adding your packages and building them with mp-repo, you can host them on an FTP or a web server to make it available to other people. Also you can add this unofficial repo to this wiki page by creating an issue.

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