To ensure the safty and security of the user space environment, unlike other Linux distributions, packages in MesaLock Linux are written in memory-safe language (e.g., Rust and Go). We select packages based on three metrics: quality, functionality and security. Please read the MesaLock Linux documentation to learn more.

There are four categories of all packages:

• core: core packages to bootstrap the system
• community: packages from community
• core-testing: new core packages or new version for trying and testing
• community-testing: new community packages or new version for trying and testing

Basically, core packages are essential packages to bootstrap the system and have the basic function. community packages are other nice-to-have packages written in Rust/Go. And core-testing and community-testing will aggressively use latest version or newer version code for testing.

A package consists of a build.yml script and related files and patches. It is very simple to include a new package in MesaLock Linux. The build.yml is a YAML file and should contain two parts: metadata and building functions.

The build tool (mkpkg) will make a package in following steps:

1. downloading source code and/or extract it into $builddir directory
2. build: building sources
3. check: testing and checking functions
4. install: zip the output as a package

There are several pre-defined variables which mkpkg will look for:

• name, version, description, url, skip_check and license: package related metadata
• build, check, install: script to build/check/install the package

Here are several pre-defined environment variables you can use in the script

• name, version: package metadata information
• builddir: directory for building package
• pkgdir: directory to install compiled code

You can find more details in the mkpkg project: https://github.com/mesalock-linux/mkpkg

Here is an example of build.yml script for ripgrep, a Rust grep tool.

package:
  name: ripgrep
  version: 0.8.0
  description: ripgrep combines the usability of The Silver Searcher with the raw speed of grep
  license: [MIT, Unlicense]
  url: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
  skip_check: true

  source:
    - git+https://github.com/BurntSushi/$name.git

  prepare:
    - cd "$name".git && git checkout -B 0.8.0

  build:
    - cd "$name".git && cargo build --release
    - cd "$name".git && cargo test

  install:
    - cd "$name".git && install -D -m744 target/release/rg -t "$pkgdir"/bin/

• Mingshen Sun <[email protected]> @mssun

The MesaLock Linux Packages project is provided under the BSD license.