Docs / Developers

Building packages

Write a recipe — ZEXBUILD and manifest.toml — and let CI build and publish the package.

Zainium packages are built from recipes. A recipe is a directory with a ZEXBUILD (a POSIX shell script, like an Alpine APKBUILD) and a manifest.toml. CI builds it in a container against the Zainium musl toolchain, checks every program's loader, packs it with substrate and publishes it to archive.zainiumdynamics.tech.

Repository	Holds
userland-recipes	community packages for the userland
syshub-recipes	the base system

Adding a package

Fork userland-recipes.
Create <pkgname>/ZEXBUILD and <pkgname>/manifest.toml (see htop/ for a complete example).
Put any *.patch files next to ZEXBUILD and apply them inside it.
Open a pull request. CI runs a build-only check.
After the merge, CI builds and publishes the package, and zex install can fetch it.

ZEXBUILD

maintainer="Your Name <you@example.com>"
pkgname=htop
pkgver=3.5.2
pkgrel=0
source="https://github.com/htop-dev/htop/releases/download/$pkgver/htop-$pkgver.tar.xz"
sha256sums="<hash>  htop-$pkgver.tar.xz"

build() {
    ./configure \
        --host="$CHOST" \
        --prefix=/overlayer/syshub \
        --sysconfdir=/overlayer/syshub/etc \
        --localstatedir=/overlayer/syshub/var
    make
}

package() {
    make DESTDIR="$PAYLOAD_DIR" install
}

Variable	Meaning
`pkgname`, `pkgver`, `pkgrel`	name (must match `manifest.toml`), upstream version, recipe revision
`source`, `sha256sums`	what to fetch and its checksums
`$CHOST`	target triplet, `x86_64-zainium-linux-musl`
`$PAYLOAD_DIR`	staging directory of the package
`subpackages`	optional `-dev` split, with a `dev()` function and its own manifest

Install prefix

Always build with --prefix=/overlayer/syshub, even for userland packages: /overlayer/syshub is the merged view of the base and the userland, so it is the only path a running program sees. The _syshub = false flag in manifest.toml decides which layer the files are written to.

substrate pack sets every binary's interpreter to the musl loader and its library path to /overlayer/syshub/lib, so recipes normally do nothing. Rust packages build against the custom x86_64-zainium-linux-musl target in the repository.

How the system protects itself

Contributing

All documentation