01_Rakudo Star Linux package

The Linux Star package is build with the RSTAR Bash-based utility

Quickstart

If you cloned the git repository, you will need to run ./bin/rstar fetch first.

After downloading and extracting the tarball, run ./bin/rstar install. Follow any on-screen instructions as they appear. That is all!

If you happen to find any bugs, please refer to the Bugs, Feedback and Patches section later on in this document to find out how you can get help.

Advanced usage

This section is intended for maintainers of the Rakudo Star distribution.

The rstar utility

To help maintainers build the distribution tarball, and end-users to make effective use of the tarball, a utility has been created, called rstar. This utility depends on the bash shell being available. Run it with -h to see what it can do.

Depending on what action you're trying to run, additional dependencies may be required. If any of these are missing, rstar will throw an error about it.

Exit codes

• 1 - die() was encountered. This is always a bug;
• 2 - The program was invoked incorrectly;
• 3 - Some required dependencies are missing.

Environment Variables

The rstar utility can be affected by environment variables. These may help out when debugging issues.

• RSTAR_DEBUG - If set to a non-null value, additional debugging output will magically appear;
• RSTAR_MESSY - If set to a non-null value, the tmp directory will not be cleaned when rstar exits.

Community Modules

One of Rakudo Star's main features is in supplying users with a number of popular community modules. This section details the mechanics of how these are included.

You should always prefer to use a pinned version of a module!

modules.txt

This file contains references to all community modules to be bundled with Rakudo Star. It is a space-separated format. The first column is the name of the module, the second the protocol to use, with the third column being the URL to fetch it from. Columns following the third have different meaning depending on the protocol.

git

The git protocol clones a single ref, with a depth of 1. Which ref is going to be cloned is specified in the 4th column of its modules.txt entry. After cloning, the .git directory is removed.

http

The http protocol is the most straightforward, it downloads a tarball (.tar.gz) and unpacks it. If a value is specified in the 4th column of the entry, this will be used as prefix, and will be stripped away when the extracted sources are moved into the dist directory.

Quickstart to Releasing Rakudo Star

Your first step will be to prepare a new tarball.

rstar clean -s              # Clean up old sources
$EDITOR etc/fetch_core.txt  # Update the various `*_version=` lines, on which the Linux TAR package will be build
$EDITOR etc/modules.txt     # Update values as necessary to add those modules with ZEF
git commit                  # Create a commit for this particular release
rstar fetch                 # Download new sources
rstar install               # Compile and install Rakudo Star
rstar test                  # Run tests
rstar dist                  # Create a new distribution tarball

Additionally, you should make a tag that represents the current release name.

Once you have a tarball, you should upload it to be available to others. Common places include:

• rakudo.org (ask around in #raku-dev for someone to help you if needed);
• Your personal website.

Next up, you will have to tell people of the new distribution tarball existing. There are several places to announce this at. The most "official" one would be the perl6-compiler@perl.org mailing list. The perl6-users@perl.org mailing list is also a good choice, as are public places such as Reddit.