Can xbps-src templates be directed at directories / github instead of packages /package files?

[gc-user]

I was wondering if I could tell a xbps-src template to get the source files from a (local or remote) directory.
Sometimes there's no new release or tag available, but instead of building from source via make, I'd like to be able to let xbps-src do the compiling - if I knew a way to tell the template to look for a directory or a github repo instead of a package / archive file.

Yes, I could clone the repo, create a tag locally, push it and then direct the template to my github tag - but I'd like to be able to skip all that work and get xbps-src directly access the source - it unpacks the package anyway, why not direct the template to the source files pre-packaging...

Or, if that is not possible, is it possible to create a package file locally using e.g. git, i.e. not having to push a tag to github to let it create the package file and then download it from github?

[Duncaen]

You can already get download urls for any commit on github, here is an example: srcpkgs/rtl8822bu-dkms/template:distfiles="https://github.com/cilynx/rtl88x2bu/archive/${_gitrev}.tar.gz"

xbps-src itself only supports fetching files over http, you can overwrite do_fetch to clone a repository but that probably won't be accepted since it 1. circumvents our checksum mechanism and since its not really supported there is no cache.

In general none of this should be done unless strictly required and probably won't be accepted into the repo unless there is a really good reason.

[gc-user]

Thanks for your reply and information!

Interesting. I obviously didn't know / realize that every commit comes with an archive file...
So, I would simply put the hash / gitrev as a "version number" so that xbps-src would find the archive file? (And replace "_gitrev" in your example of a download link with "version", obviously, to make it work.)

[Duncaen]

You can't use git revisions as version numbers since they are not ordered. You generally would invent a version like 0.0.20250729 so that you can update them like any other package and the 0.0 prefix is hopefully lower than the version number when they ever tag an actual version number.

[gc-user]

Yeah, sure, sorry, I didn't really think that really through...
I can use whatever version number if the download link is fixed and does not refer to the version (number), d'oh!
Sorry for that!