Today lantald reported on the AUR GRASS page that he cannot link QGIS against GRASS anymore after the first update.

The following discussion really highlighted the root cause of the issue (missing symlink /opt/grass, which should point to /opt/grass-6.4.2), but managed to fix the issue in the wrong way.

The proposed workaround was to restore the symlink inside the package() function of the PKGBUILD; this is a wrong solution because the symlink was made against an absolute path containing ${pkgdir}, which is going to work in that moment but it should not work once the package is installed (I’m wondering why it does work indeed).

Anyways, the real solution is to fix the symlink where it is created: inside the post_install() of the grass.install file. I’ve re-read the documentation for install file (I recommend you do it also) and checked out /usr/share/pacman/proto.install, then fixed the .install file (extending also the functionality).

This should now be fixed in pkgrel 2.

Pkgrel 2 also fixes another problem: building i686 packages in chroot didn’t work for me, I had some errors building nviz. I added another dependency to the PKGBUILD (specifically, libxmu) which was involved in the 3D stuff nviz does and voilà, the package is built.

So we also have binary packages to test, yay :)

And by the way, I was forgetting: please greet Leonardo Hardtke as a new member of the ArchLinuxGIS development team.