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visualboyadvance-m Developer Manual

Here we will keep notes about our development process, policies and environment setup guides.

Issues Policies

Processing New Issues

Follow the following steps to process newly submitted issues:

  • Edit the user's post to remove unused template sections etc.. Rephrase the issue title if it needs to be clarified.

  • Label the issue as a question, bug or enhancement. This label can be changed later upon clarification if necessary.

  • Add any other relevant labels, for example for the code subsystem.

  • If it is strongly related to a work by a developer that you know of, assign them to the issue. If this is not the case, they can be unassigned.

  • Ask the user for clarification of any details if needed.

Resolving Issues

  • An issue is resolved by closing it in github. A commit that fixes the issue should have the following line near the end of the body of the commit message:
- Fix #999.

This will automatically close the issue and assign the closing commit in the github metadata when it is merged to master. The issue can be reopened if needed.

  • A commit that is work towards resolving an issue, should have the issue number preceded by a pound sign either at the end of a commit message title, if it is of primary relevance to the issue, or the body otherwise.

Pull Request and Commit Policies

Commit Message

Follow these guidelines always:

https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html

the description of your work should be in the commit message NOT the pull request description.

Make sure your git history is clean and logical, edit when necessary with rebase -i.

Collaboration on a Branch

To update when multiple people are working on a git branch, keep a couple of things in mind:

  • Always push -f unless you're adding a commit on top. And it's almost always better to edit the history than to add more commits. Never add commits fixing previous commits, only improving or adding to them.

  • To update when someone else (very rudely you might say) did a push -f, pull --rebase will USUALLY work. Verify the log, and if necessary do this instead:

git status # should be clean, with your work having been already pushed
git fetch --all --prune
git reset --hard origin/<branch-name>

While actively working on a branch, keep it rebased on top of master.

Commits from Maintainers

Maintainers have the power to commit directly to master. This power must be used responsibly, something I fail to do myself often, and will try to improve upon.

Make your most earnest attempt to follow these general guidelines to keep our history clean:

  • Things that are a straight fix or improvement that does not require discussion can be committed directly, keeping the following guidelines in mind.

  • Bigger new features, code refactors and changes in architecture should go through the PR process.

  • Push code changes to a branch first, so they can run through the CI. Differences in what different compilers allow is a problem that comes up VERY frequently. As well as incompatibilities between different configurations for both the C++ code and any supporting code.

Strings, Character Sets and Translations

Pulling Updated Translations

Once in a while it is necessary to pull new and updated translations from transifex.

For this you need the transifex client, available for Windows as well from chocolatey as transifex-client.

To pull translations run:

tx pull -af

then check git status and if any message catalogs were updated, commit the result as:

git commit -a --signoff -S -m'Transifex pull.'
git push

Translations Message Catalog

Strings that need to be translated by our wonderful translators on transifex (thank you guys very much) need to be enclosed in _("..."), for example:

wxLogError(_("error: something very wrong"));

The next time you run cmake after adding a string to be translated, the .pot message catalog source will be regenerated, and you will see a loud message telling you to push to transifex.

Strings in the XRC XML GUI definition files are automatically added to the message catalog as well.

If you are working on a branch or a PR, don't push to transifex until it has been merged to master.

Once it is, push it with:

tx push -s

Interaction with non-wxWidgets Code

Use our UTF8(...) function to force any wxString to UTF-8 for use by other libraries, screen output or OS APIs. For example:

fprintf(STDERR, "Error: %s\n", UTF8(err_msg));

There is one exception to this, when using wxString::Printf() and such, you can't pass another wxString to the %s format directly, use something like this:

wxString err;
err.Printf("Cannot read file: %s", fname.wc_str());

this uses the wchar_t UTF-16 representation on Windows and does nothing elsewhere.

For calling Windows APIs with strings, use the wide char W variants and the wc_str() method as well.

Windows Native Development Environment Setup

This guide has been moved to:

https://github.com/rkitover/windows-dev-guide

Release Process

Environment

The variable VBAM_NO_PAUSE, if set, will cause cmake to not pause before gpg signing operations, you want to set this if you've disabled your gpg passphrase to not require interaction during release builds.

gpg set up with your key is helpful for the release process on all environments where a binary is built, but you can also make the detached signature files yourself at the end of the process.

For codesigning windows binaries, put your certificate into ~/.codesign/windows_comodo.pkcs12.

On Mac the 'Developer ID Application' certificate stored in your login keychain is used, keychain unlock will prompt you for your login keychain password, to avoid that set the LOGIN_KEYCHAIN_PASSWORD environment variable to your password.

Release Commit and Tag

Once you are sure you're ready to release, and you are in a git clone on master with a clean working tree, use the cmake script to make the release commit and tag:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DTAG_RELEASE=TRUE

then push the release:

git push
git push --tags

If you don't want to push the release, to back out the change do:

cmake .. -DTAG_RELEASE=UNDO

64-bit Windows Binary

For this you will preferably need the powershell environment setup described earlier, however you can use a regular Visual Studio 64 bit native developer command prompt as well.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-windows-static -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DUPSTREAM_RELEASE=TRUE -G Ninja
ninja

Collect the following files for the release:

  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-64bit.zip
  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-64bit.zip.asc
  • translations.zip
  • translations.zip.asc

32-bit Windows Binary

For this the optimal environment is a linux distribution with the mingw toolchain, I use fedora.

You can set up a shell on a fedora distribution with docker as described here:

https://gist.github.com/rkitover/6379764c619c10e829e4b2fa0ae243fd

If using fedora, the cross script will install all necessary dependencies, if not install the base toolchain (mingw gcc, binutils, winpthreads) using the preferred method for your distribution, you can also use mxe for this.

https://mxe.cc/

sh tools/win/linux-cross-builder -32

You can also use msys2 on Windows, this is not recommended:

sh tools/win/msys2-builder -32

To set up msys2, see this guide:

https://gist.github.com/rkitover/d008324309044fc0cc742bdb16064454

Collect the following files from ~/vbam-build-mingw32/project if using linux, or ~/vbam-build-msys2-x86_64/project if using msys2:

  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-32bit.zip
  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-32bit.zip.asc

64-bit Mac Binary

Install the latest Xcode for your OS.

You will need bash and (optionally) gpg from homebrew (which you will also need to install):

brew install bash gnupg

You will need a codesigning certificate from Apple, which you will be able to generate once you join their developer program. This is the certificate of the type 'Developer ID Application' stored in your login keychain. keychain unlock will prompt you for your login keychain password, to avoid that set the LOGIN_KEYCHAIN_PASSWORD environment variable to your password.

/usr/local/bin/bash tools/osx/builder -64

Collect the following files from ~/vbam-build-mac-64bit/project:

  • visualboyadvance-m-Mac-64bit.zip
  • visualboyadvance-m-Mac-64bit.zip.asc

Final steps

Go to the github releases tab, and make a release for the tag you pushed earlier.

Put any notes to users and distro maintainers into the description as well as the entries from CHANGELOG.md generated earlier from git by the release commit script.

Upload all files collected during the earlier builds, the complete list is:

  • translations.zip
  • translations.zip.asc
  • visualboyadvance-m-Mac-64bit.zip
  • visualboyadvance-m-Mac-64bit.zip.asc
  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-32bit.zip
  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-32bit.zip.asc
  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-64bit.zip
  • visualboyadvance-m-Win-64bit.zip.asc

Update the winsparkle appcast.xml by running this cmake command:

cmake .. -DUPDATE_APPCAST=TRUE

follow the instructions to push the change to the web data repo.

Announce the release on reddit r/emulation and the forum.