Preparing for packaging

This page details prerequisite steps required before either creating a new package recipe or updating an existing package recipe. If you have not yet followed the prerequisites steps and Basic Packaging Workflow, follow those steps first before proceeding.

Update your clone of the recipes repository

As a reminder, you want to ensure you have the volatile repository enabled and fully updated on your system.

Whilst all the information can be found in the prior pages, to recap, the commands will be:

sudo moss repo enable volatile
sudo moss sync -u
gotoaosrepo
git switch main
gh repo sync yourusername/yourfork -b main
git pull

Switch to a new git branch

When conducting any packaging work, it is a good idea to separate out your work in a different branch. This allows you to isolate changes you make from one package in a separate branch to changes you make to a different package in a second branch and so on. This additionally is helpful as it keeps your work separate to any underlaying changes made to the main recipes repository, more easily allowing you to rebase your work if needed.

git checkout -b "branch-name"

Change “branch-name” to whatever description you feel comfortable with. Our general convention is to use the format add-packagename or update-packagename depending on whether you are adding a new package or updating an existing one.

You can check what branch you are on and what branches you have in your repository with the following command:

git branch -a