Why are non-Debian distro's marked unsupported?

[Deep Majumder]

Hi,

I have noticed that under supported platforms, for Linux (x86_64), it says that "Debian-based distros only). Is there a specific reason for this disclaimer? For instance, why would building Fuchsia on Fedora or Arch not work? Or why is there an anticipation that it would not work?

Warm regards,

Deep Majumder

[Abdulla Kamar]

There are probably others who can speak to this better than I can, but I believe most of this stems from the fact that the Fuchsia team does development on a Debian-based distro and has not tested extensively with other distros, so we can't make any guarantees when it comes to Fedora or Arch.

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[Shai Barack]

That's correct. We continuously build and test Fuchsia on certain configurations and can guarantee that these work correctly. On other configurations we cannot make the same guarantees, and furthermore we may not be able to reproduce let alone fix any reported issues. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/fuchsia.dev/d/msgid/discuss/CAH%2Bq2nwSK28%3DZoyheePEi26auzPFTdvRZ8wa-3ktHiGj133tLg%40mail.gmail.com.

[Shai Barack]

We don't depend on any package management system from a particular Linux distribution.

There are subtle differences like the version of bash that we detected in the past as possible reasons for builds failing on other distributions. I think there was talk about working around this by vending a shell prebuilt, but I don't recall where we landed on this.

On Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 7:06 PM Deep Majumder <deep.maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Afaik the only real difference between distros is the package management system (apt vs yum vs pacman). So does Fuchsia depend on package management systems for building?

Warm regards,

Deep Majumder

[Shai Barack]

If any of this is a problem for you, and you are willing to send changes to address it, then I'm happy to review them. 

[Deep Majumder]

Sure, I would definitely like to contribute towards this issue. My distro currently is Arch.

Do you have links or pointers to the threads containing the discussions you mentioned? And are the issues you mentioned filed in Monorail (so I can go refer back to them)?

[Shai Barack]

I recall at least one thread on this subject right here on discuss@. You may be able to search for it.

I don't recall anyone reporting trying to build Fuchsia on Arch. 

[Deep Majumder]

Hi,

Afaik the only real difference between distros is the package management system (apt vs yum vs pacman). So does Fuchsia depend on package management systems for building?

Warm regards,

Deep Majumder

On Mon, 22 Nov, 2021, 3:38 am Shai Barack, <sha...@google.com> wrote:

[Deep Majumder]

Hi,

I guess you are referring to the following thread: https://groups.google.com/a/fuchsia.dev/g/discuss/c/pr25bD9x5Ro/m/fEXyBlJvBAAJ

On that thread, the issue mentioned is that zsh may not support the $(<"$OUTFILE") syntax. However, according to section 14.4 of the zsh manual (https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Command-Substitution), it is indeed supported by zsh as well (assuming somehow zsh got called instead of bash, which it should according to the shebang line). So, I would be a bit surprised  if that was what was causing problems.

That said, it may be possible that the bash that ships with MacOS Big Sur has the bug.

However, I couldn't find any discussions regarding any Linux distro.

Warm regards,

Deep

[Shai Barack]

If you run into specific issues with your distro, and can send a patch to fix them, then I'm happy to review it. 

[James Tucker]

On Sun, Nov 21, 2021 at 11:47 PM Deep Majumder <deep.maj...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I guess you are referring to the following thread: https://groups.google.com/a/fuchsia.dev/g/discuss/c/pr25bD9x5Ro/m/fEXyBlJvBAAJ

On that thread, the issue mentioned is that zsh may not support the $(<"$OUTFILE") syntax. However, according to section 14.4 of the zsh manual (https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#Command-Substitution), it is indeed supported by zsh as well (assuming somehow zsh got called instead of bash, which it should according to the shebang line). So, I would be a bit surprised  if that was what was causing problems.

That said, it may be possible that the bash that ships with MacOS Big Sur has the bug.

However, I couldn't find any discussions regarding any Linux distro.

fwiw, we build on macOS all the time, and with users with zsh as their default shell. I suspect this user had some additional unusual configuration in their environment leading to the issue, such as the env(1) sh(1) wrapper the build is using somehow being broken leading to arguments being passed incorrectly. It's unlikely that the specific syntax was leading to the issue, as it's been well supported for many years.

 

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