pkgcheck

Dependencies

pkgcheck is developed alongside pkgcore. To run the development version of pkgcheck you will need the development version of pkgcore.

The metadata.xml checks require lxml to be installed.

Installing

No installation is strictly required, just run the pkgcheck script and things should work. For a more permanent install see the following options:

Installing latest pypi release in a virtualenv:

pip install pkgcheck

Installing from git in a virtualenv (latest snakeoil/pkgcore are often required):

pip install https://github.com/pkgcore/snakeoil/archive/master.tar.gz
pip install https://github.com/pkgcore/pkgcore/archive/master.tar.gz
pip install https://github.com/pkgcore/pkgcheck/archive/master.tar.gz

Installing from a tarball or git repo:

python setup.py install
pplugincache pkgcheck

Tests

A standalone test runner is integrated in setup.py; to run, just execute:

python setup.py test

In addition, a tox config is provided so the testsuite can be run in a virtualenv setup against all supported python versions. To run tests for all environments just execute tox in the root directory of a repo or unpacked tarball. Otherwise, for a specific python version execute something similar to the following:

tox -e py27

Notes

Currently full tree scans will use a large amount of memory (up to ~1.7GB) in part due to pkgcore's restriction design in relation to the expanding use of transitive use flag dependencies across the tree. To alleviate this pkgcore.restrictions will be refactored, probably leading to splitting conditionals off into their own set.

Configuration

No configuration is required, but some configuration makes pkgcheck easier to use.

Suites

With no configuration it will try to guess the repository to use based on your working directory and the list of repositories pkgcore knows about. This will usually not quite work because the same location often has multiple "repositories" with a slightly different configuration and pkgcheck cannot guess which one to use.

Defining "suites" in the configuration solves this ambiguity. A "suite" contains a target repository, optionally a source repository to use as a base and optionally a set of checks to run. If there is a single suite with a target repository containing the current directory it is used. So with the following suite definition in ~/.pkgcore.conf:

[pkgcheck-gentoo-suite]
class=pkgcheck.base.Suite
target_repo=gentoo

you can run pkgcheck with no further arguments inside your portage directory and it will do the right thing.

Make sure the target repo properly specifies its masters in metadata/layout.conf if it's meant to be an overlay, otherwise many errors are likely to be produced relating to missing licenses, categories, dependencies, etc.

Finally, you can define a different checkset per suite:

[pkgcheck-gentoo-suite]
class=pkgcheck.base.Suite
target_repo=gentoo
checkset=no-arch-checks

This disables checks that are not interesting unless you can set stable keywords for this suite. See Checksets for more information.

Instead of relying on the working directory to pick the right suite you can specify one explicitly with pkgcheck --suite.

Checksets

By default pkgcheck runs all available checks. This is not always desired. For example, checks about missing stable keywords are often just noise in the output for ebuild devs. A checkset defines a subset of checks to run. There are two kinds: one enabling a specific set of checks and one running every available check except for the specified ones. Examples:

[no-arch-checks]
class=pkgcheck.base.Blacklist
patterns=unstable_only stale_unstable imlate

[only-arch-checks]
class=pkgcheck.base.Whitelist
patterns=unstable_only stale_unstable imlate

The first disables the three specified checks, the second enables only those three. For available names see pkgcheck --list-checks.

patterns is a whitespace-separated list. If the values are strings they need to match a component of the name in --list-checks exactly. If it looks like a regexp (currently defined as "contains a + or *") this needs to match the entire name.

Checksets called no-arch-checks and all-checks are defined by default.

There are various ways to pick the checkset to use: pquery --checkset, the checkset setting of a suite and setting default=true on a checkset in the configuration.

Reporters

By default the output is in a colorful human-readable format. For full tree checks this format may not be optimal since it is a bit hard to grep. To use an output format that prints everything on one line, put this in your configuration:

[pkgcheck-plain-reporter]
class=pkgcheck.reporters.plain_reporter
default=true

To use a non-default reporter use pkgcheck --reporter. To see the reporters available use pconfig configurables pkgcheck_reporter_factory.