Translations:Create Manjaro Packages/69/en

• Before you can automate the package building process, you should have done it manually at least once unless you know exactly what you are doing in advance, in which case you would not be reading this in the first place. Unfortunately, although a good bunch of program authors stick to the 3-step build cycle of "./configure; make; make install", this is not always the case, and things can get real ugly if you have to apply patches to make everything work at all. Rule of thumb: If you cannot get the program to compile from the source tarball, and make it install itself to a defined, temporary subdirectory, you do not even need to try packaging it. There is not any magic pixie dust in makepkg that makes source problems go away.
• In a few cases, the packages are not even available as source and you have to use something like sh installer.run to get it to work. You will have to do quite a bit of research (read READMEs, INSTALL instructions, man pages, perhaps ebuilds from Gentoo or other package installers, possibly even the MAKEFILEs or source code) to get it working. In some really bad cases, you have to edit the source files to get it to work at all. However, makepkg needs to be completely autonomous, with no user input. Therefore if you need to edit the makefiles, you may have to bundle a custom patch with the PKGBUILD and install it from inside the prepare() function, or you might have to issue some sed commands from inside the prepare() function.