# DeveloperWiki:GNOME Guidelines

# Introduction

The GNOME packages on Arch Linux follow a certain schema. The following items are important considerations for packing GNOME software.

# Gnome profile initialization

There is no gnome profile initialization anymore. The old line below should be stripped from any PKGBUILD:

    [ -z "$GNOMEDIR" ] && . /etc/profile.d/gnome.sh

# GConf schemas:

Many GNOME packages install GConf schemas. These schemas get installed in the system GConf database, which has to be avoided.

Some packages provide a --disable-schemas-install switch for ./configure, which hardly ever works. Therefore, gconftool-2 has a variable called GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL, whenever this is set, gconftool-2 won't update any databases.

When creating packages that install schema files, use:

    make GCONF_DISABLE_MAKEFILE_SCHEMA_INSTALL=1 DESTDIR=$startdir/pkg install

for the package installation step in the PKGBUILD.

GConf schemas need to be installed and removed in the .install file using pre_remove, pre_upgrade and post_upgrade and post_install. Use gconf-merge-schemas to merge several schemas into one package specific file, install or uninstall them with usr/sbin/gconfpkg --(un)install $pkgname.

The usage of gconfpkg requres a dependency on gconf>=2.18.0.1-4 (or gconfmm>=2.20.0).

# Scrollkeeper documentation

Starting from GNOME 2.20 there's no need to handle scrollkeeper anymore, as rarian reads OMF files directly. Scrollkeeper-update is a dummy these days. The only required thing now is to makedepend on gnome-doc-utils>=0.11.2.

# .desktop files

Many packages install Freedesktop.org compatible .desktop files and register MimeType entries in them. Running "update-desktop-database -q" in post_install() and post_remove() is recommended.

# GTK Icon cache

Quite some packages install icons in the hicolor icon theme. These packages should depend on hicolor-icon-theme and should have "gtk-update-icon-cache -q -t -f usr/share/icons/hicolor" in the post_install, post_upgrade and post_remove function.

# .install files

For many gnome packages, all .install files look almost exactly the same. The gedit package contains a very generic install file.

Basically, the only thing that has to be changed is the pkgname variable on top of the .install file. As long as pacman doesn't supply us with the pkgname variable, we need to supply it in the .install file. When packages don't have gconf .schemas, hicolor icon files, or .desktop files, remove the parts that handle those subjects.

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