Linux Packaged Installation Process

[JamesMc86]

For v3.0.0 I'm going to propose an install from source for the main G-CLI proxy so that isn't delaying things while I work out supporting packaging across supported distros.

We will need to install ourselves though and use a .deb and .rpm package as options. The install process can probably just run like the MSI process for Windows.

[jimkring]

Sharing this, in case you haven’t seen it:
https://github.com/kornelski/cargo-deb#readme

[JamesMc86]

So I'm looking through platforms supported by LabVIEW 2017 and up and we need an rpm and deb for them.

I'm going to exclude RHEL 6 as it feels very out of date by this stage.

So The lowest glibc requirement for an rpm target is 2.17 on RHEL/Centos 7 and this should be compatible with the oldest supported OpenSuse (glibc 2.19 on 42.1).

So for RPM build a centos7 container is probably ideal.

Ubuntu is more straightforward given a single supported distro so we will build a debian package against Ubuntu 18.

I probably need to start manually and test against these old versions manually to confirm the process. Then integrate it as CI stages to build and capture the deb and rpm for the vipm build.

[JamesMc86]

Wow cargo-deb is really as simple as advertised.

Looks like cargo-generate-rpm (https://github.com/cat-in-136/cargo-generate-rpm) is the answer for rpm distros. I had hoped as it doesn't use the native tools that it might run on any distro but not having any luck with it under ubuntu. Either way all of the older systems are rpm based anyway so likely we will have to run two build processes for packaging.

[JamesMc86]

OK made some good progress on this but got bogged down in NI/Linux issues and may not be able to pick it up until next week.

• rpm and deb files are now built in ci and included in the vi package.
• After getting VIPM and LV talking on Ubuntu (LV2023) the package installed but the pre-install didn't install g-cli. I need to add some logging and work out why.
• On OpenSuse it throws a file error for the VIP file and wont attempt install - should have grabbed the message but was something about an invalid format. This is using the same version of VIPM as Ubuntu so that is ruled out (latest 2023 beta from the discord)

[JamesMc86]

Running into permissions issues as if LabVIEW is already running it isn't sudo - with community edition I've found running as root causes activation issues.

Probably for the first release we can just point Linux users to the package files on github. It actually makes a little more sense anyway as you may need multiple library installs to one proxy install.