Keywords

Keywords indicate the stability of game engines (architectures) for a given package.

Most packages declare one of the following engine-specific keywords in their KEYWORDS field:

  1. Stable: arch (E.g. openmw) - This version of the mod and the pybuild are tested and not known to have any serious issues with the given platform.

  2. Testing: ~arch (E.g. ~openmw) - The version of the mod and the pybuild are believed to work and do not have any known serious bugs, but more testing should be performed before being considered stable.

  3. No keyword: If a package has no keyword for a given arch, it means it is not known whether the package will work, or that insufficient testing has occurred for ~arch.

  4. Masked: -arch (E.g. -openmw) The package version will not work on the arch. This likely means it relies on a feature not supported by the engine, or contains serious bugs that make it unusable.

By default, only stable versions of packages are installed. For unstable versions you will need to accept the keyword.

You can enable testing packages by default by overriding the default ACCEPT_KEYWORDS in portmod.conf with the testing keyword appropriate for your engine.

You can accept keywords for specific packages by adding the mod version and keyword to package.accept_keywords. E.g:

=base/patch-for-purists-3.2.1 ~openmw
# To ignore keywords and make the package visible regardless of keywords
>=base/patch-for-purists-3.1.3 **

Versioned Keywords

New in version 2.6.

Keywords can also be versioned. This is an optional feature, and may not be set up for every engine, but it allows packages to be marked as stable/testing/masked on specific versions, in addition to generally.

E.g.

# Stable on 0.48 and later
KEYWORDS = "openmw{>=0.48}"
# Masked on 0.47.0, but stable on all other versions
KEYWORDS = "openmw -openmw{==0.47.0}"
# Stable on 0.47 and related patch versions, but only testing on 0.48 and newer and older versions
KEYWORDS = "~openmw openmw{0.47*}"

When versioning is set up in the profile, ACCEPT_KEYWORDS can also be versioned. Usually it will default to use the ARCH_VERSION profile variable.

E.g. in portmod.conf

ACCEPT_KEYWORDS = "openmw{==0.48.0}"
# If you want to accept packages testing on your version
# Note that when using f-strings, literal '{' has to be escaped as '{{',
# so there end up being three
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS = f"~openmw{{=={ARCH_VERSION}}}"

See Architecture Versioning in the development guide for further details.