Developer’s Guide

This section is about contributing to mmpack.

We use gerrit (https://intranet.mindmaze.ch/mmlabs/gerrit/) as code review tool. If you do not know gerrit, there is a standard debian package called git-review which helps you interacting with gerrit (basically just call “git review” once you are ready to send a commit for review).

The master branch is … the master branch. We fork to create releases, and currently only maintain the last major release while working on a new one. This means that the master branch receives the current development; all commits go through unit testing in continuous integration (CI).

CI tests for:

  • python codespell compliance
  • python pylint compliance
  • unit tests

There are additional helper commands such as “make spelling” to help you spot typos.

Dependency breakdown

Runtime dependencies

mmpack

  • libyaml
  • libcurl
  • libarchive

mmpack-build

  • python3
  • python3 elftools module
  • python3 pefile module
  • python3 yaml module

When creating a package, mmpack-build builds the project from source. This means that you also must be able to build it.

mmpack-build has a set of pre-defined build plugins for the usual build systems. Each plugin requires the corresponding tool-chain to be installed to work.

Available plugins are:

  • cmake
  • meson
  • autotools
  • make (pure makefile)
  • python (python setuptools)

A project using a custom tool-chain not listed above can make use of the mmpack/build specific specfile to build, in which case, you should inspect that file to know what the required dependencies are.

Build dependencies

You will need the usual (essential) build tools like make, gcc, perl …

The mmpack project uses the autotools build system, which is therefore needed to build.

mmpack

mmpack-build

None.

Tests

All runtime dependencies, plus:

  • check

Documentation

To generate the user documentation :

  • sphinx
  • sphinx-rtd-theme

Additional requirement to generate the internal development documentation:

Test tools

The first test tool is the “make check” target, which is the one that will be called by the CI

There are two main development scripts in the devtools folder:

  • test-shell.sh, spawns a shell with a local-installation of mmpack and a clean mmpack prefix.
  • pkg-create-tests.sh, creates several mmpack packages. Call with the SMOKE variable set to only build and test mmpack-hello-world.

Memcheck suppression file

mmpack dependencies (mostly through libcurl) have some memory leaks. Those are intentional and not bugs. They are identified and listed in the devtools/mmpack.supp file. Call as follows:

echo $PWD
# ~/mmpack/build
valgrind --suppressions=../devtools/mmpack.supp -- mmpack update