Binary Recipes

Binary recipes (recipes that install precompiled binaries of software, rather than compiling it from source) are permitted but discouraged where possible. These recipes should have _bin suffixed to the version number as a marker, for example Sun-JDK 1.6.0_03_bin, even where there is no corresponding source recipe.

Source recipes are preferred where possible, as these allow optimisation and bugfixing, but binaries are acceptable in some circumstances. In general, a binary recipe will be accepted if it meets one of the following criteria:

  1. The software is only available in this form from the vendor. Sun-JDK is an example of this.
  2. Compiling the software cleanly is not possible or plausible on GoboLinux yet. Programs using the Maven build system are an example of this.
  3. The vendor provides prebuilt binaries in addition to the source, and:
    1. The software is sufficiently large for compilation to be a large task with little gain (OpenOffice)
    2. The vendor binaries are customised in some fashion, or multiple parallel products from the same source are built with different tasks (the various Eclipse builds: -Java, -C++, -EE, etc). In this case, the program name should be specific to the type of build: Eclipse-Java, Eclipse-SDK.
  4. The software requires a copy of itself to build, and isn’t shipped with the default system. GHC is an example of this. In this case, the binary version should be named differently: GHC-Bin installs the pre-built GHC, which can be used to compile the source GHC.
  5. A source recipe would present some difficulty, and nobody has made one yet.

Each program is assessed individually, and some may be accepted outside these guidelines. In any case, it never hurts to ask or submit a recipe if you’re unsure.

Guidelines for binary recipes

  • Submitters should append an extra _bin string to the application’s version. This is the adopted convention to identify binary recipes.
  • Everything specific to a given architecture shall be inside its arch subdir. This includes url=, file=, file_md5=, file_size= and any functions dealing with specific tarball contents that might change from one architecture’s tarball to another. MD5 sums are especially important for binary recipes are they are used to assess the validity of the installed data, which could not be verified as usual by looking at the sources. Make sure the file_md5 entry exists.
  • Distribution license must be filled in Resouces/Description. If the license is unknown, Resources/Description should set it as [License\] Other (or the license name as appropriate), and a file named Resources/COPYING should contain the license in question. “Known licenses” are those found in these OSI list or the FSF list.