Building Chawan

Chawan uses GNU make for builds.

Variables

Following is a list of variables which may be safely overridden. You can also override them by setting an environment variable with the same name.

• TARGET: the build target.
  • debug: Generate a debug build, with stack traces and debugging symbols enabled. Useful for debugging, but generates huge and slow executables.
  • release: The default target. Uses LTO and strips the final binaries.
  • release0: A release build with stack traces enabled. Useful when you need to debug a crash that needs a lot of processing to manifest. Note: this does not enable line traces.
  • release1: A release build with debugging symbols enabled. Useful for profiling with cachegrind, or debugging a release build with gdb.
• OUTDIR: where to output the files.
• NIM: path to the Nim compiler.
• CFLAGS, LDFLAGS: flags to pass to the C compiler at compile or link time.
• OBJDIR: directory to output compilation artifacts. By default, it is .obj.
• PREFIX: installation prefix, by default it is /usr/local.
• DESTDIR: directory prepended to $(PREFIX). e.g. you can set it to /tmp, so that make install installs the binary to the path /tmp/usr/local/bin/cha.
• MANPREFIX, MANPREFIX1, MANPREFIX5: prefixes for the installation of man pages. The default setting expands to /usr/local/share/man/man1, etc. (Normally you shouldn’t have to set MANPREFIX1 or MANPREFIX5 at all, as these are derived from MANPREFIX.)
• CURLLIBNAME: Change the name of the libcurl shared object file.
• LIBEXECDIR: Path to your libexec directory; by default, it is relative to wherever the binary is placed when it is executed. (i.e. after installation it would resolve to /usr/local/libexec.)
• STATIC_LINK: Set it to 1 for static linking.
• DANGER_DISABLE_SANDBOX: Set it to 1 to forcibly disable syscall filtering. Note that this is not taken from the environment variables, and you must use it like make DANGER_DISABLE_SANDBOX=1.
  Warning: as the name suggests, this is rarely an optimal solution to whatever problem you are facing.

This list does not include the CC variable, because Nim only supports a limited set of C compilers. If you want to override the C compiler:

1. Set CC to the respective compiler anyways, because it is used by chaseccomp.
2. If your compiler is supported by Nim, then set e.g. FLAGS=--cc:clang. Check the list of supported compilers with nim --cc:help.
3. If your compiler is not supported by Nim, but emulates another compiler driver, then add e.g. FLAGS=--gcc.path=/usr/local/musl/bin --gcc.exe=musl-gcc --gcc.linkerexe=musl-gcc

Phony targets

• all: build all required executables
• clean: remove OBJDIR (i.e. object files, but not the built executables)
• distclean: remove OBJDIR and OUTDIR (i.e. both object files and executables)
• manpage: rebuild man pages; note that this is not part of all. Manual pages are included in the repository, so this only needs to be called when you modify the documentation.
• install: install the cha binary, and if man pages were generated, those as well
• uninstall: remove the cha binary and Chawan man pages

Cross-compiling

Apparently it’s possible. From user cutenice (with dependencies updated):

With the latest changes, I could simply run CFLAGS=-m32 LDFLAGS=-m32 FLAGS=--cpu:i386 make to cross-compile!

I don’t know if I have any additional insight from today’s exploration.. On Arch I needed these things:

• nim-git from the AUR
  • the version available in the repos isn’t quite new enough it seems. I think it’s related to #12 (at least i got similar looking errors)
• enable the multilib repository in /etc/pacman.conf
• pacman -S lib32-openssl lib32-libxcrypt lib32-libssh2
  • most of these packages pull packages like lib32-gcc-libs and lib32-glibc which might be useful as well haha
• the rest can be eluded from the PKGBUILD in the AUR

Static linking

Tested with musl as follows:

• Install musl to the default path (/usr/local/musl)
• Add the following to $HOME/nim.cfg:

cc:gcc
gcc.path = "/usr/local/musl/bin"
gcc.exe = "musl-gcc"
gcc.linkerexe = "musl-gcc"

• Compile and install OpenSSL, libssh2, libbrotlicommon and libbrotlidec to /usr/local/musl.
• Compile Chawan:

$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/musl/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/musl/lib64/pkgconfig
$ export CC=musl-gcc STATIC_LINK=1
$ make distclean
$ make