Cports is a collection of source package ports for Chimera. The system has been written specifically for the distribution using the Python scripting language.

The system is largely inspired by xbps-src from Void Linux, but should not be considered a variant of it, nor should it be expected that the options and behaviors are the same.

There are two authoritative documents on the system:

• Usage.md is the reference for users. It covers usage of cbuild and its basic and advanced options as well as concepts and requirements.
• Packaging.md is the reference manual for packagers. It covers the API of the system and guidelines for creating and modifying templates, but not usage.

Most people looking to get involved with the project should read both.

To get started, read Usage.md first.

You might want to test your built packages in an actual Chimera system. Since cbuild creates a regular apk repository for you, this is as simple as adding the repositories in your system.

Consider path to cports at /home/user/cports. The default repository path for cbuild is the packages directory directly in cports. This is not the actual repo yet, as there are multiple categories. The actual repositories are those that have a directory named like your architecture (e.g. x86_64) with the file APKINDEX.tar.gz in them.

Create a file /etc/apk/repositories.d/00-cports.list. The file must have the .list extension. Put something like this in there:

/home/user/cports/packages/main
/home/user/cports/packages/contrib

This will give apk acccess to the main and contrib packages of your local repository. You might want to restrict this list to only the repositories that you have.

If you want access to local -dbg packages, you will also want to add the debug sub-repositories, e.g. /home/user/cports/packages/main/debug.

You will also want to drop your signing public key in /etc/apk/keys. The key can be located in etc/keys in the cports directory, with the .pub extension (do not put in the private key).

You might also want to pin the local repository. This will effectively make apk prefer your pinned repository even if a newer version if available in remote repos. This is done by adding a prefix such as @cports before the repository line, e.g. @cports /home/user/cports/packages/main. Then you can install things from the repository like apk add foo@cports. If you just apk add foo, the tagged repositories will be ignored.

Note that dependencies of packages from pinned repositories will still be pulled from unpinned repositories preferentially, but pinned repositories will be used if necessary. This is not the case for dependencies of packages from unpinned repositories, which will only ever be pulled from unpinned repositories.

For instructions on how to bootstrap the system into a target root as well as some more advanced tooling for e.g. creation of actual images, check out the chimera-live repository.