You may ask, why would you port pacman to Debian? Is it just a completely idiotic exercise?
There is actually a reason. The main goal is to use all the other tools included in pacman such as repo-add and makepkg in free integration environments such as GitHub Actions.
For example, this allows small-scale projects to have their packages built "nightly" while using the standard GitHub Actions Ubuntu 20.04 Runner!
There are ways to use Arch Linux docker images within Ubuntu, but from what I've read it can be inconsistent to keep running properly.
manjaro-removed-pkgs is a repository that contains all the packages the Manjaro team removes from the Arch Linux Repositories. The main reason I created it is to get linux-zen running on my Manjaro laptop. I've currently got it syncing hourly using GitHub Actions.
GitHub offers a pretty generous "unlimited" actions/minutes per month for public repositories.
With pacman's tools set up to work on Debian, you can effectively get a 24/7 Arch Linux build server for free.
GitHub Actions could even be used as a back up build server of sorts for simple packages on the Chaotic-AUR!
Let me know what you think! My hope is that this project can help people successfully use GitHub Actions for their Arch Linux Projects!
I initially considered just downloading the Pacman Package from the Arch Linux repo, extracting, and then copying makepkg an repo-add to /usr/bin, but I ran into a few problems.
Although makepkg and repo-add are shell scripts, they make calls to a few .conf files and system libraries provided by pacman. Not to mention a few steps in the script use pacman itself
I considered copying those necessary files as well, but it started to get really unelegant. I also had issues with pacman associated with glibc being older on Ubuntu. At that point, I figured it be worth it to build a package that can easily be installed/removed.
It looks like pacman-static could help address the glibc issue. However, it has a lot of extra steps involved and still requires building anyways. I can just add glibc-source to the Debian package’s package requirements. In addition, it looks like pacman-static would run into a lot of issues with attempting to overwrite pre-existing files on Debian (which apt will refuse).
Finally, you are correct, GitHub does not offer an Arch Linux docker image. However, it is possible to run in docker on their Ubuntu runner. I’ve just heard of it running into issues between shared libraries and the kernel since Docker is a weird sort of limbo land between Virtualization and a container.
@jonathon
Upon further examination of pacman-static it appears to just be a compiled version of pacman with libraries installed in it. The only commands you can run with it are with "pacman." It does not include repo-add, makepkg, or any other tools.
It could alternatively be used to supply "pacman" in the pacman-utils package, but there isn't a strong benefit in my mind.
To get pacman and all its tools working on Ubuntu all I had to do was compile it from source on Ubuntu (which requires a lot of packages, but isn't too bad). After that, the only necessary dependencies for the actual package are:
