This Week in Ekala #2

Welcome to This Week in Ekala #2! Here's what happened this week.

Highlights

• Full PulseAudio and GStreamer multimedia stacks now build in corepkgs, unblocking ISO images and desktop audio
• Meson and Go/Rust builders gained structured attribute support, reducing boilerplate and shrinking dependency chains
• ekapkgs-cli added package templating, fuzzy search, tab completions, and hardened CAS storage
• eka-ci reached end-to-end functionality with passthru test discovery

corepkgs

4 packages were added as build-fix dependencies and several existing packages received build corrections.

• Pulseaudio
  Ported PulseAudio and its dependency chain — flac, libsndfile, mpg123, speex, speexdsp, and webrtc-audio-processing — enabling audio support for QEMU images and minimal systems.
• Gstreamer
  Added the full GStreamer multimedia stack: core, base, good, bad, ugly, libav, devtools, ges, and rtsp-server, along with supporting libraries like graphene, orc, and taglib.
• Pulseaudio: fully build
  Completed PulseAudio by porting all optional dependencies — libjack2, lirc, sbc, waf, and others — so it builds fully for ISO images and minimal systems.
• Meson enhancements
  Introduced mesonFeatures for handling enabled/disabled/auto flags and improved mesonEntries to infer Nix booleans as Meson booleans, significantly reducing boilerplate across dozens of Meson-built packages.
• Prune testing from Go and Rust builds
  Eliminated redundant test builds from the Go and Rust builders by automatically adding version checks to passthru.tests, shortening build times and shrinking dependency chains.
• GTK / Hardware improvements
  Added GDB, valgrind, and split linux-firmware packages (per-vendor WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPU firmware), plus a firmware-aware hardware facter module for automatic firmware selection.
• Finish Dev shells
  Added modular dev shell support with dotenv, enterShell, env, files, packages, scripts, and treefmt modules for language ecosystems. Linters and LSPs were moved to ekapkgs.

ekapkgs-cli

• Harden CAS storage, server security, and client cache robustness
  Migrated CAS directory storage to SQLite with transactional ingest, added blake3 digest verification, GC primitives, path traversal prevention, and improved client-side chunk cache eviction.
• Add package management improvements and tab completions
  Added a store path index, symlink directory management, package name validation with fuzzy suggestions, background home apply via systemd timers, and dynamic tab completion for packages and services.
• Improve package search with fuzzy matching and remote indexes
  Package search now supports fuzzy matching with highlighted results and auto-downloads pre-built search indexes from configurable remote URLs.
• Update nix packaging, systemd hardening, and documentation
  Added CAS storage backend documentation, systemd hardening for the server module, and new docker, drv-diff, and wtf subcommands.
• Add templating
  Integrated nix-template functionality for scaffolding new package expressions, with automatic build system detection and URL-based source prefetching.

eka-ci

• Get e2e working
  Brought the CI pipeline to end-to-end functionality with passthru test discovery, jobset filtering, and improved Nix evaluation handling.