Building blendOS (and its packages)

This one was pretty simple. First off, I just made an organization to hold all my blendOS code on my Forgejo instance just to keep it organized. Then I just cloned all the relevant repositories from upstream (blendOS · GitLab), added my own code with some minor fixes and stuff, then pushed the updated code to my server.

After that, it was just a matter of adding the actual packaging for the code. For the packages that were required for building the blendOS iso file, if I didn't have my own repository for them already, I just made a new branch, updated the packaging, and pushed the packaging to that branch.

Looking at the package list from image-builder (blendOS / image-builder · GitLab), it seems the only blendOS-specific packages it uses are:

filesystem-blend
blend-inst-git
jade-gui
blend-git
blend-settings-git
blend-web-store-git
akshara-git

At first, after a bit of minor troubleshooting, I got this all set up and working, pretty simple.

Oops it didn't work actually

I then realized that my iso file worked, but was not using my repo, and I had even forgotten to even add some of the packages.

Turns out I had added my repo to the container's pacman configuration, but not to the pacman config for archiso, the tool used to generate the iso file, or the actual resulting iso image's pacman config either. So while I would have been able to install anything from my repo in the container, the repo was unused by archiso.

I just added the missing packages needed to build the iso file, plus all the others on blendOS's GitLab, and rebuilt it. After a bit of troublshooting (nothing interesting, just incompetency, wrong perms, stuff like that), I got it working perfectly.

Topology of my blendOS repo

        |-----------------|
        |                 |
        | package builder |
        |                 |
        |-----------------|
                 |
                 |
                 ↓
      |-----------------------------|
      |          ↓                  |
      |    |----------|             |
      |    | packages |             |
      |    |----------|             |
      |                             |
      | Arch/blendOS                |
      | repository                  |
      |                             |
      |           |-----------|     |
      |           | blendOS   |     |
      |           | iso files |←---←|←---←
      |           |-----------|     |    |
      |                             |    |
      |-----------------------------|    |
             |                           |
             |                           |
             |                           |
             ↓                           |
    |-------------------------|          |
    |                         |          |
    | Arch/blendOS            |          |
    | clients                 |          |
    |                         |          |
    |   |--------------|      |          |
    |   | blendOS iso  |-----→|→---------↑
    |   |   builder    |      |
    |   |--------------|      |
    |                         |
    |-------------------------|

Citations

 Saraswat, Rudra, et al. “blendOS · GitLab.” GitLab, git.blendos.co/blendOS. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.
 Saraswat, Rudra, and Asterisk. “blendOS / image-builder · GitLab.” GitLab, git.blendos.co/blendOS/image-builder. Accessed 3 Oct. 2024.