Package GHDL for MinGW32/MinGW64

[Paebbels]

Now we have automatic builds for the MinGW32 (mcode) and MinGW64 (llvm) environments. It would be nice to provide a package for MinGWs package manager pacman.

Here is a description I found: https://github.com/msys2/msys2/wiki/Creating-Packages

If we can provide such a description, it would be the first distro, that could provide GHDL as an official package.

As we are providing MinGW32 and MinGW64 builds, we might need to provide two package descriptions. The MinGW package repository is maintained on GitHub as a repository of package descriptions: https://github.com/alexpux/mingw-packages

We need to provide a package description file: mingw-w64-ghdl/PKGBUILD

@tgingold Can you please clone that repo to your account and grant access to me, so we can try to create such a description file?

[andreygursky]

Pacman based ArchLinux has ghdl package since 2.5 years in AUR:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ghdl/

[Paebbels]

@andreygursky Oh, nice. Who updates that package description to 0.35? Could this person also maintain the MinGW descriptions for GHDL?

[andreygursky]

I just know about its existence, but sorry nothing more.

[Paebbels]

I think this PKGBUILD template could fit our needs. It supports packaging from GitHub.

[tgingold]

I am not the right assignee for this issue: I don't use windows, so I don't want to maintain the mingw package.

[eine]

Seems that the maintainer of the AUR package can be @vicencb , who already contributed a couple of commits to this repo. Might be worth hearing his opinion on how similar/different AUR and MinGW packages are.

[Paebbels]

@tgingold By assigning you, I meant that we need someone to fork the MinGW packages repo :).

Or we could move GHDL to a GitHub organisation on it's own, if GHDl needs more related repositories.

[vicencb]

Hi,
neither I am a windows user. In fact, I didn't even know the existence of a MinGW repository of PKGBUILDs.
Sorry, but I can not help here.

[eine]

FTR, two PKGBUILD files (one for mcode and another one for llvm) are added in branch actions of my fork (see https://github.com/1138-4EB/ghdl/commits/actions). Moreover, AppVeyor (and subdir dist/windows/appveyor) are deprecated in favour of GitHub Actions. Putting both modifications together, in the workflow which is executed after each push or PR:

• In a MSYS shell, a ghdl-mcode package is built for mingw32 and a ghdl-llvm package is built for mingw64. Then, each of them is installed.
• In a corresponding shell (MINGW32 or MINGW64), the testsuite is executed.

See example run: https://github.com/1138-4EB/ghdl/runs/210613752

---

I proposed adding 'stable' versions of these PKGBUILD files downstream (see msys2/MINGW-packages#5757).

---

In 1138-4EB/ghdl-packaging (ref #901), three versions are provided for each backend:

• mcode|llvm: stable. Currently, v0.36.
• mcode-rc|llvm-rc: release candidate. Some commit SHA between 'stable' and 'git'.
• mcode-git|llvm-git: latest from master.

[eine]

Apart from the PKGBUILD files available in dist/msys2-mingw of this repo, GHDL is now available in official MSYS2 repos: mingw-w64-ghdl (i686, x86_64). See msys2/MINGW-packages#5757 and msys2/MINGW-packages#6688. See also hdl/MINGW-packages.

[tgingold]

Congrats for all the work!