Packaging tools for Propeller2
![pullmoll](https://forums.parallax.com/uploads/userpics/W1MLPZ6NBRET/nFLYM27F0RWJE.jpg)
Hi there,
some of you may remember me from the old P1 forums, Z80 and emulators stuff etc.
I now finally got my P2 mini starter bundle and want to use it on Linux.
For a couple of years I have been packaging libraries and applications for Void Linux: https://voidlinux.org and https://github.com/void-linux/, and this is the distribution I use for my daily work and everything else.
What I wanted to do now is create set of package templates for the P2 tools which can be built for Linux.
I don't yet have a detailed insight to what's needed and what makes sense to package.
Can someone point me to a list of packages and ideally their dependencies?
I saw that https://github.com/parallaxinc/ and https://github.com/totalspectrum/ probably have most of what I need or want. Still, some advice to what comes first and/or what depends on what else would make the job of creating a bundle of P2 packages for Void a lot easier for me.
Cheers and many thanks for the years of development of the P2
Jürgen
Comments
Parallax tools are Windoze only at the moment. So, for them, Wine could be considered a dependency.
David Zemon might be helpful - https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/comment/1460742/#Comment_1460742
Peter Jakacki has Taqoz listed just down from there.
For Eric's tools, I've only used flexspin and loadp2. Both are simple compiles with GCC via a makefile once cloned from Github. Flexprop is in TCL, I haven't used it.
Ross H has Catalina - https://forums.parallax.com/discussion/172036/catalina/p1
If it's just the P2 you're interested in then I think https://github.com/totalspectrum/flexprop has everything you need to get started. It depends on the usual build tools, bison, and Tk8.6 or later -- actually Tk8.5 probably works as well, that's what's used on the Mac. The control file for building .deb packages is checked in to DEBIAN/control, although most people have been building from source. The steps for that are:
To add P1 support also requires OpenSpin from https://github.com/parallaxinc/openspin. Openspin is only used while building (the WiFi support in proploader requires it), it isn't needed at run time.
Packaging with wine as a dependency is not an option for Void.
If you want to, or have to, use Windows, you can use either of wine, qemu, virtualbox-ose with a Windows installation or similar, and people generally know and accept that. I want to package what runs on Linux w/o emulation.
I'll have a look a David Zemon's package list and take that as a guide. Tcl is an easy dependency.
I started my try with loadp2 from totalspectrum only to realize it needs a
fastspin
binary on the host:so I first have to package the app which contains fastspin and list it as a host dependency.
We (read: Void Linux) also cross build packages for e.g. aarch64, arm, mips, and for two C libraries: glibc and musl.
Once I figured the hierarchy of dependencies it should be easy to add the package templates.
Thanks for the links!
Ok, trying to package spin2cpp I need bison/flex in the host. Then I see a missing include file "ast.h" which probably comes from yet another dependency. Looks like I need to set some CFLAGS or CPPFLAGS for include paths.
I'll see how far I get with flexprop.
FWIW Void Linux does not use git clone but distfiles (tarballs) for reproducible builds.
Thus for flexprop I need to convert the recursive dependencies either as additional distfiles in the same template, listing their version numbers or git hashes, or make them separate packages to be built and to be included as make dependencies.
flexprop has everything you need -- it includes spin2cpp and loadp2, and builds them in the appropriate order. Do the recursive clone, and then ignore the .git subdirectory and just use the spin2cpp and loadp2 subdirectories that git checked out. I think it's easier than trying to build them yourself individually.
If you do want to build the projects seperately, the build order is:
spin2cpp, then loadp2, then flexprop
that is, flexprop depends on both loadp2 and spin2cpp, and loadp2 depends on spin2cpp.
I don't understand why ast.h woud be missing in your spin2cpp build. That's not an external dependency, it's at the top level of the spin2cpp tree. I think something must have gone wrong with your checkout.
The spin2cpp template is now working. Step #1 done, and I managed to use a wrong commit title ;-)
@ersmith the problem was that Void package build system defines the CFLAGS and so the ones in the Makefile would not be used. OTOH if I had used the Makefile CFLAGS (by setting
make_use_env=yes
), the Void hardening would not be used. The solution was to append the Makefile's CFLAGS to the ones which the packaging system defines. This is what the template now does.The
-fcommon
is required because gcc10 complains about multiple definitions for a symbol, in this case it wasgl_progname
. GCC versions prior to 10.x silently combined these definitions to a common address.For loadp2 you may want to grab a new copy; I forgot to change "fastspin" to "flexspin" in board/sdcard/Makefile, so it probably wasn't working (in the flexprop build environment this doesn't matter, the flexprop Makefile overrides the loadp2 one). Just checked in the fix.
@ersmith Yeah, loadp2 is next and in the template I used the 037 release so far. Would you mind to tag another release with the fix(es)?
It seems I need to add the
./include
inspin2cpp
and put them into e.g.usr/include/spin2cpp
.We usually divide package binaries and libraries from development files, so there should be a
spin2cpp-devel
package which has these include files, while the binaries would go in the main package.Or are the binaries useless without these includes in any case?
Then the
spin2cpp
package itself should have the include files.For
loadp2
I then need to specify the location of these include files with-I
as far as I can tell.I tried with the latest git commit 4171a18abac40131da4ddb745a2b20ec215a2d6d.
The Makefile doesn't use CFLAGS or CPPFLAGS at all, so I'll have to patch it...
..or rather write a new Makefile ;-) Compiling multiple *.c files into one binary in one step is causing all kinds of troubles.
The spin2cpp include directory is needed in order to compile binaries for the P2 (the plain spin2cpp converter from Spin to C can probably get by without it, but I haven't checked lately).
The usual directory tree for this stuff is something like:
Putting them in this kind of format makes things simpler, since e.g. flexspin looks for its include files by default in ../include relative to its own binary. There are environment variables that you can use to override these. Note that the spin2cpp include files are for building binaries for use on the P2, not for the host, so I wouldn't put them under /usr/include.
I suggest creating some standard P2 tool root (like /usr/local/p2tools) and using the layout above for where things go relative to this. Then either create symlinks in /usr/local/bin, or have simple script files that invoke the tools from their "canonical" place.
(My native build environment is Debian Linux, and I actually keep all the tools in a folder called "flexprop" in my home directory, and added ~/flexprop/bin to my PATH.)
I created a new loadp2 release, and new releases for spin2cpp and flexprop. Current versions are v045 for loadp2, and v5.1.1 for flexprop and spin2cpp.
Uh, ok, that makes sense! I'll probably use
/usr/libexec/p2tools
as a base directory then.We usually don't use
/opt
and definitely not/usr/local
for packages managed by Void's xbps package manager.So when
/usr/libexec/p2tools
would be the base the binaries would install to/usr/libexec/p2tools/bin
and can be symlinked into
/usr/bin
to make them available without changes to the user's PATH environment.Or there could be shell scripts like
/usr/bin/flexspin
which first change to/usr/libexec/p2tools/bin
and then exec the real binary.'ll try to get loadp2 working with using this layout and modified spin2cpp installation. Thanks for the hints!
Perfect. Now
spin2cpp-5.1.1
installs as suggested tousr/libexec/p2tools
andloadp2-045
builds w/o problems with this setup.So step #2 is done and next on the list is
flexprop
.Edit: Oh, there's
PropLoader
in theflexprop
tree. Will see if I need to package that one also.PropLoader is P1 only, so if you're just interested in P2 support you can skip it (the Makefile will not try to build PropLoader if openspin is not installed).
I see. I missed to install
version.h
in thespin2cpp
package.Looks like
flexprop
expects it to be inspin2cpp/version.h
or is itinclude/spin2cpp/version.h
? I will see.TBH there's nothing really to build for flexprop, if you already have loadp2 and flexspin then you just need the flexprop.tcl file and the src/ directory -- flexprop proper is written in Tcl so it doesn't need compilation. The bulk of the work in the flexprop Makefile is building the subsidiary tools in the right order, and converting the docs from markup to PDF and HTML (Oh yeah, making the .pdf files depends on TeX and pandoc, so if you want to build the docs you'll need those.) There's also a lot of Windows and Mac specific stuff which you won't need.
@pullmoll![:) :)](https://forums.parallax.com/resources/emoji/smile.png)
Hi Jurgen,
Welcome back!
I used your QZ80 as a base (rather than heaters zicog) to get my cpm emulation running on P2
I haven't gone the whole hog and get xbyte running with it yet as I' still on the P2 OS.
Interested to see where you go with the linux stuff and P2![;) ;)](https://forums.parallax.com/resources/emoji/wink.png)
Rgds, Ray
Got
flexprop
to install w/o using the Makefile at all, i.e. just converted thespin2cpp/version.h
tosrc/version.tcl
and installed the scripts to/usr/libexec/p2tools/flexprop.tcl
and/usr/libexec/p2tools/src
.I removed the
src/tcl_library
because I want to use the tcl/tk provided by the system.The package template then creates a wrapper shell script in
/usr/bin/flexprop
which hasexport SOURCE=/usr/libexec/p2tools/src
, changes the directory to/usr/libexec/p2tools
and then callsexec /usr/bin/wish flexprop.tcl
. So far that seems to work.I cannot however select my USB serial port which is
/dev/ttyUSB0
, and I think I need to patch in some additional devices to scan for.Uh, scrap that.. I should enable the USB device to make it appear in![:wink: :wink:](https://forums.parallax.com/resources/emoji/wink.png)
/dev
Also need to depend on
xterm
because that is the default terminal and is not default installed in Void, because DEs usually have their own terminal implementations.Trying to compile one of the
/usr/libexec/p2tools/samples
files now of course fails because the user has no right to write into that directory. I'm thinking of making the wrapper script create a copy of the examples in e.g.~/.local/share/p2tools/samples
on the first run, i.e. when that directory does not yet exist.The official builders of Void now packaged
flexprop-5.1.1_1
and its dependencies and all is working fine.So thanks again @ersmith for the hints.
Now the only thing I'd like to have is being able to define the flexprop main window font family and size.![:smiley: :smiley:](https://forums.parallax.com/resources/emoji/smiley.png)
On a 4k display the UI is just too tiny to be useful
Hi @Cluso99 , glad to be here again. Now I have another great toy to waste time for. Life is wonderful.
Great news, @pullmoll . Thanks for doing this!
I'm not a Tcl/Tk expert, but I suspect there's some way to change the default font used for the UI elements like menus and such (maybe an environment variable? or an X11 setting?). The text and command window fonts are already customizable from the Options > Editor Options dialog box.
FWIW I tried to add this to
src/gui.tcl
which has some effect:This option affects only the menu items and I have no idea how to specify the fonts for e.g. buttons, text input fields, labels etc. They are just as tiny as before.
I will search the net for more detailed info on that option setting. Perhaps font family and size choice can then become a configurable and/or command line parameter.