Long time no post. I did quite a lot of things around ogon these last months, and for testing purpose, I had to deploy ogon on many hosts. The deployment guide is ok, but it's a long and repetitive operation. And thinking of it, if we can write these instructions in a manual, then for sure we can automate these operations in a script.

Accendino

So I've created that little software accendino (lighter in italian) that will allow you to start a big fire (ogon in russian). The script will apply all deployment instructions (with a notable exception of system commands for now) that are given in the manual: required package installation, git checkouts, compilation and installation. And the script will respect dependencies between the ogon modules, for example to install the ogon greeter, you will need to install before FreeRDP, ogon, ogon-apps and ogon-platform-qt.

An environment for developping ogon

Accendina allows to choose the kind of compilation, which make it ideal to deploy a development environment for ogon, for example with:

$ python accendino.py --prefix=/opt/ogon --build-type=debug

You will have all git repos checked out in the work directory, with all modules compiled in debug. Then you can just touch the sources and recompile by hand, or use accendino to redeploy.

Installing alternative ogon sources

You can specify a "sources" file to Accendino, this will be where to find some custom versions of ogon and its dependencies and how to compile them (for some extra options for instance). The file for ogon forgiare allows to have some nice new features for ogon by taking my versions of ogon.

Let's have a look at the file:

from accendino import CMakeBuildItem, DepsBuildItem, AutogenBuildItem, XOGON_ENV, OGON_opts, pkgItemsCopy
from accendino import ITEMS_PKG as BASE_ITEMS_PKG

BUILD_ITEMS = [
    CMakeBuildItem('ogon-forgiare', ['freerdp2'], ('https://github.com/forgiare/ogon.git', 'future'),
                                    OGON_opts, parallelJobs=False, provides='ogon'),
    AutogenBuildItem('ogon-xserver-forgiare', ['ogon'], ('https://github.com/linuxrrze/xorg-xserver.git', 'master'),
        extraEnv=XOGON_ENV, runInstallDir='hw/xogon',
        configureArgs=['--disable-xfree86-utils', '--disable-linux-acpi', '--disable-linux-apm', '--disable-xorg', '--disable-xvfb',
                       '--disable-xquartz', '--disable-standalone-xpbproxy', '--disable-xwin', '--disable-glamor', '--disable-kdrive',
                       '--disable-xephyr', '--disable-xfake', '--disable-xfbdev', '--disable-kdrive-kbd', '--disable-kdrive-mouse',
                       '--disable-kdrive-evdev', '--with-vendor-web="http://www.ogon-project.com"', '--disable-xquartz', '--disable-xnest',
                       '--disable-xorg', '--enable-xogon', '--disable-xwayland', '--with-xkb-output=/usr/share/X11/xkb/compiled',
                       '--with-xkb-path=/usr/share/X11/xkb', '--with-xkb-bin-directory=/usr/bin/',
                       'LDFLAGS=-Wl,-rpath={prefix}/{libdir}:{prefix}/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/'],
                       provides='ogon-xserver'),

    DepsBuildItem('forgiare', ['ogon-forgiare', 'ogon-xserver-forgiare', 'full-ogon-freerdp2']),
]


ITEMS_PKG = {}
pkgItemsCopy(ITEMS_PKG, 'ogon-forgiare', 'ogon') # just copy entries of 'ogon' for all distrib
pkgItemsCopy(ITEMS_PKG, 'ogon-xserver-forgiare', 'ogon-xserver') # just copy entries of 'ogon' for all distrib


DEFAULT_TARGETS='forgiare'

A source file is interpreted as a python script, so the imports directives at the beginning, and so we have all the possibilities of python scripting for the sources file.

BUILD_ITEMS contains a list of module definitions. It has a git location to checkout, some dependencies with other accendino modules, and depending on the build system (cmake, autotools or meson), a bunch of options can be set. Please note that the provides option allows to substitute an official ogon module with your own (as soon as you ask for it to be built first). In our example ogon-forgiare says that when you build it, you get a version of the ogon module. The forgiare file replaces the ogon and X ogon modules with some repo with improvements

ITEMS_PKG contains a list of system packages to install by distribution and by accendino module.

And finally DEFAULT_TARGETS can be use to change the target that is built by default, when nothing is given on the command line.

Of course you can also use accendino to add your own new package in a ogon deployment.

To conclude

By writing a custom source file, I have been able to quickly deploy some custom builds of ogon. Accendino is young and probably needs improvements but I've use it successfully on Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Once we will have .deb or .rpm packages, this tool will lose of its interest (except for development environment) but in the meantime it's really useful.