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Troubleshooting for Packagers

This page covers common packaging issues and how to fix them. We also show you how to share your packaging work so you can ask for help in the Solus Matrix rooms.

Asking for help​

When you run into a problem that you don't know how to fix you should ask for help in the Solus Packaging Matrix room. But first you should send the package.yml file and solbuild output to somewhere others can see it; we recommend you use GitHub Gists. These commands assume you have set up github-cli.

If you would rather not use Gists, use a pastebin site like bpaste

Send the package.yml file in the current directory to a public Gist:

cat package.yml | gh gist create --public

Send the output of solbuild to a public Gist:

go-task |& gh gist create --public

Note: the usual solbuild output will not be shown when this command is running, and it will take at least a few seconds

Send the output of solbuild to a new output.txt file:

go-task |& tee output.txt

Common Issues​

"Error downloading https://github.com/project/blah/1.2.3.tar.gz: checksum mismatch"​

Your source tarball does not match the checksum next to it in package.yml. You should use go-task new or go-task update to write the correct checksum automatically.

"Failed to build packages err="Failed to fetch source https://github.com/project/blah.git#{commit ref here}, reason: exit status 1\n"​

If your build fails immediately this message, and you are using a git source, you should clear the solbuild git sources cache:

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/solbuild/sources/git

"mount: /var/lib/solbuild/roots/unstable-x86_64: WARNING: source write-protected, mounted read-only"​

If you interrupt a build sometimes solbuild does not unmount cleanly, and you will need to unmount manually:

sudo umount -f /var/lib/solbuild/roots/unstable-x86_64

Solbuild is eating up all my disk space​

The solbuild cache at /var/cache/solbuild can grow to tens of gigabytes easily. Recover that disk space by running the "delete cache (dc)" command:

sudo solbuild dc

An old package using %configure doesn't build​

  • Replace %configure with %reconfigure and try again.
  • If %reconfigure produces the error configure: error: unrecognized option: '--runstatedir=/run', then use the new %configure_no_runstatedir macro

Something is wrong with my solbuild profile​

Try running go-task solbuild-reset. This will delete the solbuild cache and profile, then download and initialize a fresh copy of the default unstable profile.

Git commands fail and complain about package checks​

git commit --amend
WRN packages/q/qqwing/package.yml:1: Package release is not incremented by 1
ERR packages/q/qqwing/pspec_x86_64.xml:1: Package release is not incremented by 1
Package checks failed: /home/user/solus-packages/common/CI/package_checks.py packages/q/qqwing/package.yml packages/q/qqwing/pspec_x86_64.xml
  • Solus uses pre-commit hooks to check for simple errors. Right now, certain git commands can fail, particularly git commit --amend and git commit --fixup
  • You can bypass the pre-commit hooks by adding the no-verify option, for example: git commit --amend --no-verify. Checks will still be run by GitHub after a Pull Request is created.