rakudo-pkg: Create OS packages for Rakudo Perl 6 using Docker

There was an interesting discussion on #perl6 (irc.freenode.net) about the use of rakudobrew as a way for end-users to install Rakudo Perl 6 (see how-to-get-rakudo).

rakudobrew, inspired by perlbrew, is a way to manage (and compile) different versions of rakudo. nine argued that it’s primarily meant as a tool for rakudo developers. Because of the increased complexity (e.g. when dealing with modules) it’s not targeted at end-users. While being a big fan of rakudobrew, I agree with nine.

The problem is that there are no Linux binaries on the download page (there are for MacOS and Windows), so users are stuck with building from source (it can be fun, but after a while it isn’t).

rakudo-pkg is a github project to help system administrators (and hopefully Rakudo release managers) to easily provide native Linux packages for end users. So far, I added support for creating Ubuntu 16.04 LTS amd64 and i386 packages and Centos 7 amd64. These are the systems I use the most. Feel free to add support for more distributions.

rakudo-pkg uses Docker. The use of containers means that there is no longer need for chasing dependencies and no risks of installing files all over your system. It also means that as long the building machine is a Linux 64-bit OS, you can build packages for *all* supported distributions.

Within the containers, rakudo-pkg uses fpm. The created packages are minimalistic by design: they don’t run any pre/post scripts and all the files are installed in /opt/rakudo. You’ll have to add /opt/rakudo/bin to your PATH. I also added two additional scripts to install Perl 6 module managers (both have similar functionalities):

install_panda_as_user.sh
install_zef_as_user.sh

If you just want to create native packages, just go to the bin directory and execute the run_pkgrakudo.pl command. In this case there is no need to locally build the Docker images: you’ll automatically retrieve the image from the rakudo namespace on Docker Hub. Of course, if you want to create the container images locally, you can use the supplied dockerfiles in the docker directory. Have a look at the README.md for more information.

You can find examples of packages created with rakudo-pkg here (they need to be moved to a more definitive URL).

Have fun.

https://github.com/nxadm/rakudo-pkg