Compiling Pacman on macOS 13.0 Ventura

DISCLAIMER: This is hardly the shortest path to success. This is just what I did to use pacman on Ventura.

About Pacman

Pacman is the default package manager for the Arch Linux distribution of Linux. For more information about using Pacman, visit the Arch Linux wiki.

Dependencies

I've installed everything to /opt/pacman.

sudo mkdir /opt/pacman && sudo chown $USER:staff /opt/pacman

export BOOTSTRAP=/opt/pacman
export PATH=$BOOTSTRAP/bin:$PATH

1. Command line tools

xcode-select --install

2. bash >= 4.4

macOS 12 appears to ship with bash 3.2—pacman requests at least 4.4. I'm installing 5.1 because it compiled with these flags, and 4.4 didn't.

curl -O https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/bash/bash-5.1.tar.gz
tar -xzvf bash-5.1.tar.gz

pushd bash-5.1

./configure --prefix=$BOOTSTRAP
make install

popd

3. pkg-config

curl -O https://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/releases/pkg-config-0.29.2.tar.gz
tar -xzvf pkg-config-0.29.2.tar.gz

pushd pkg-config-0.29.2

./configure --disable-debug --prefix=$BOOTSTRAP --with-internal-glib
make
make install

popd

4. libarchive

libarchive is included in macOS but I haven't looked into using it. Here it's compiled from source.

curl -O https://www.libarchive.org/downloads/libarchive-3.6.0.tar.xz
tar -xvf libarchive-3.6.0.tar.xz

pushd libarchive-3.6.0

./configure --prefix=$BOOTSTRAP
make && make install

popd

5. openssl

curl -O https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.1.1n.tar.gz
tar xzvf openssl-1.1.1n.tar.gz

pushd openssl-1.1.1n

perl ./Configure --prefix=$BOOTSTRAP darwin64-arm64-cc
make
make install

popd

6. meson and ninja

Pacman uses meson and ninja build systems now...ok. Install them.

python3 -m pip install meson
python3 -m pip install ninja

The pip install bin directory is not on the PATH by default, but the location is python version dependant. python3 --version will give you a semver number, but the path uses only the major and minor versi...anyway, this path might not exist if your python version is different, but add meson to your PATH, or otherwise find out where it is.

export PATH=$HOME/Library/Python/3.9/bin:$PATH

Building pacman

git clone https://gitlab.archlinux.org/pacman/pacman.git
pushd pacman
git checkout v6.0.1

HACKS

This patch does a few things:

• replaces some GNU util arguments with BSD equivalents e.g. touch, date, etc.
• disables pacman sudo requirement
• does not build in fakeroot

curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kladd/pacman-osx/macOS-13.0/pacman.patch
git apply pacman.patch

Build and install.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$BOOTSTRAP/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH

# TODO: Disabled i18n to avoid library dependency,
meson build \
	--prefix=$BOOTSTRAP \
	--sysconfdir=$BOOTSTRAP/etc \
	--localstatedir=$BOOTSTRAP/var \
	--buildtype=plain \
	-Di18n=false -Dscriptlet-shell=$BOOTSTRAP/bin/bash
meson compile -C build
meson install -C build

kladd@kvm pacman % $BOOTSTRAP/usr/bin/pacman --version

 .--.                  Pacman v6.0.1 - libalpm v13.0.1
/ _.-' .-.  .-.  .-.   Copyright (C) 2006-2021 Pacman Development Team
\  '-. '-'  '-'  '-'   Copyright (C) 2002-2006 Judd Vinet
 '--'
                       This program may be freely redistributed under
                       the terms of the GNU General Public License.