Overview

Simply put, a recipe is some metadata to describe a software package, and the associated instructions required to build that package in a reproducible fashion. Doing so allows us to automate builds, and provide software updates. At a surface level, our stone.yml recipe format has an awful lot in common with other packaging systems.

A basic recipe

How might a stone.yml look like for a very trivial package, such as the Nano editor?

name        : nano
version     : 8.7
release     : 38
homepage    : https://www.nano-editor.org/
upstreams   :
    - https://www.nano-editor.org/dist/v8/nano-8.7.tar.xz : afd287aa672c48b8e1a93fdb6c6588453d527510d966822b687f2835f0d986e9
summary     : GNU Text Editor
description : |
    Nano is a small and simple text editor for use on the terminal.
    It copied the interface and key bindings of the Pico editor but
    added several missing features: undo/redo, syntax highlighting,
    line numbers, softwrapping, multiple buffers, selecting text by
    holding Shift, search-and-replace with regular expressions, and
    several other conveniences.
license     :
    - GPL-3.0-or-later
builddeps   :
    - binary(msgfmt)
    - pkgconfig(libmagic)
    - pkgconfig(ncursesw)
    - pkgconfig(zlib)
setup       : |
    %configure
build       : |
    %make
install     : |
    %make_install

..It really is that simple. However, do not let the simplicity of the format fool you, boulder has a lot of hidden powers.