This page describes the process of packaging for LackMan.

Basics



Generally, LackMan package consists from a description of the package and a set of archives. Each archive corresponds to a separate package version, while package description describes the most recent version.

The package description file is named like the package itself, converted to lowercase and whitespaces removed. So for a package called Cool New Icons the corresponding file would be coolnewicons.xml.

Description example



The XML file for the Modern Bubbling package, which we will create in the next section, looks like this:



 Modern Bubbling
 An Adium chat style theme from the Adiumxtras site.
 
  azoth
  theme
  chat styles
  adium
 
 
  1.0
 
 
  
  
 
 A nice theme with lots of variants.<br /><br />
This package contains two variants: plain Modern Bubbling and Compact version, which allows to group consecutive messages into a single message bubble.<br /><br />
This theme is available at <a href="http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3629">http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=3629</a>
 
  Georg Rudoy
  0xd34df00d@gmail.com

Creating package description



Package description is, well, just an XML file describing that package. That XML format isn’t documented yet, though I hope someday it would be.

The best method of creating the description file is to use our tiny lcpackgen program. It’s simple as hell and could be obtained via git: git://github.com/0xd34df00d/lcpackgen.git. It uses Qt and builds with cmake and could be built everywhere LeechCraft can run.

Here we will show by example how lcpackgen can be used. We’d make a description file for package Modern Bubbling, which is an Adium chat style for Azoth.

So, we run lcpackgen and see something like this:


We start filling different fields and noting where the label in bottom right corner becomes green, meaning that we have provided enough information. So, we fill in some fields in the Basic tab:


Please note how we use HTML in the Long description field.

Then we set what versions are available:


Our theme doesn’t have any dependencies, so we leave that field blank. Also note that the label in the bottom right corner tells now that the description is valid. We can basically save the description, but since our theme is a really nice piece of artwork, we’d provide a screenshot:


In these fields, we can list URLs of screenshots and thumbnails, one URL per line.

Finally, we save the description to a directory containing all the stuff (like archives) related to our package as modernbubbling.xml.

Archives



Creating proper archives for the packages is documented on the corresponding Archives page.

Getting it into the repo



After you’ve created the package description and the corresponding archive (or several archives), you can either create an issue on our issue tracker with your files attached, send them into the maillist (), or find us in our XMPP conference, leechcraft@conference.jabber.ru.

After that, if all goes well, your package would be in the LackMan repos: