05:09 <whitequark> so i finally gave up on the conda crap and tried to build the quicklogic toolchain from source

05:10 <whitequark> naturally that doesn't work either

05:10 <whitequark> ah hm, it's picking up the wrong yosys

05:32 <HackerFoo> whitequark: Any interest in using Nix instead of Conda?

05:35 <whitequark> HackerFoo: i tried nix a while ago, i like it in theory (unlike conda) but i didn't have such a great experience either

05:36 <whitequark> what i would actually appreciate is the quicklogic toolchain as a ... tarball

05:36 <whitequark> you know the same thing vivado is doing

05:36 <whitequark> that would be actually great

05:37 <whitequark> oh yeah the source code instrctions for vpr are just completely broken

05:37 <whitequark> $ git clone https://github.com/SymbiFlow/vtr-verilog-to-routing -b blackbox_timing

05:37 <tpb> Title: GitHub - SymbiFlow/vtr-verilog-to-routing: SymbiFlow WIP changes for Verilog to Routing -- Open Source CAD Flow for FPGA Research (at github.com)

05:37 <whitequark> Cloning into 'vtr-verilog-to-routing'...

05:37 <whitequark> fatal: Remote branch blackbox_timing not found in upstream origin

05:38 <HackerFoo> I hate tarballs that dump garbage all over the place. "Uninstall? Ha, why would you want to do that?"

05:38 <whitequark> HackerFoo: just a self contained one you can unpack into /opt

05:39 <whitequark> the current experience is /significantly worse than proprietary tools/

05:39 <HackerFoo> If you're interested, you can try: https://github.com/HackerFoo/nix-symbiflow

05:39 <tpb> Title: GitHub - HackerFoo/nix-symbiflow: Nix packages for SymbiFlow projects and dependencies (at github.com)

05:39 <whitequark> no i don't want to learn nix

05:40 <whitequark> i just want a fucking toolchain that works

05:40 <whitequark> is it that hard?

05:40 <HackerFoo> I started on a quicklogic branch, but didn't have time to finish it.

05:41 <HackerFoo> There's a lot of moving parts right now.

05:42 <HackerFoo> Ideally, there would be compatible packages of Yosys, VTR, etc. in whatever distro you prefer, like GCC, binutils, etc.

05:43 <HackerFoo> But there are some patches required to get things working for now.

05:44 <whitequark> I don't really care about patches

05:44 <whitequark> I'm saying that both the binary and the source distributions are completely unusable right now, the former for me, the latter for everyone

05:49 <HackerFoo> I struggled with it as well. That's why I wrote the Nix stuff.

05:50 <HackerFoo> But things will get better as things get upstreamed.

05:51 <whitequark> why is it necessary to wait for upstreaming to have working instructions to build from source?

05:52 <HackerFoo> It's not. It just makes the instructions shorter.

05:52 <HackerFoo> Or, change less often.

05:53 <HackerFoo> Because it doesn't help if the instructions are always out of date.

05:54 <whitequark> why not... have CI check installation instructions?

06:06 <HackerFoo> For which distro? Which version?

06:06 <whitequark> you know what would also solve my problem? not bothering with this toolchain at all

06:06 <HackerFoo> This is exactly what Nix solves.

06:06 <HackerFoo> Being an early adopter is never easy.

12:16 <sf-slack> <pgielda> @whitequark, sorry for that we are changing multiple things at the same time so there is a lot of moving parts. In any case somebody will soon paste a tutorial on how to compile stuff from scratch using a clean debian.

12:20 <sf-slack> <pgielda> Ranting on conda does not help btw. Its a packaging choice made long time ago. Its maybe annoying but works and while personally I am *personally* not a fan (I use gentoo I like ebuilds and sources only... i also dislike pip) it does not mean it does not work. In fact contrary -- there is a CI in symbiflow-examples repo that does a clean conda installation on travis and test the tutorial.

12:22 <sf-slack> <pgielda> Obviously the tutorial needs updating because its outdated... but again the whole project is a lot of people doing a lot of things so not always everything is easy and works. In any case if there is a particular issue lets disccuss it on github in the relevant issue

12:22 <sf-slack> <pgielda> Oh and in different timezones so I usually miss the most interesting discussions and rants ;)

16:05 <HackerFoo> Conda works on a clean install (as tested in CI) but usually fails for updates, which is annoying given that rebuilding arch-defs can take several hours.

16:06 <HackerFoo> Then, if you change anything locally (e.g. working on a local copy of VTR) you have to manually keep things synchronized.

16:14 <HackerFoo> A tarball is fine for users, but this is open source, so we need more developers if things are going to get better.

16:19 <hzeller> How many dependencies are there that can't be simply installed with a debian package ?

17:01 <HackerFoo> hzeller: It could all be bundled into one giant package, requiring a ~20GB install every month or so to get the latest improvements.

17:32 <djph> Not 100% sure if this is ontopic for the channel -- found some links as I was hunting for linux fpga programmers ... there any "gotchas" I might've missed with the project in general? (everything seems to have compiled, I think, but the devboard won't arrive til monday at the earliest)

22:57 <mithro> @djph Are you talking about for using the QuickFeather board or?

23:17 <djph> mithro: no, the ice40 one

23:19 <mithro> djph: I know of about 5-10 iCE40 based boards, I'm guessing either the Fomu or the icebreaker?

23:19 <djph> uhh,

23:20 <djph> icestick

23:22 <mithro> djph: What do you want to use it for?

23:24 <djph> no idea ... first _actually_ reasonable priced board i saw. bit of a rabbit hole :) kinda more was looking at smaller / older things, but "on linux" is apparently not high on many lists.

23:27 <hzeller> I still have an Icestick in my gadget drawer somewhere. I think my first experiments with Yosys+Arachne a few years back were with this one.

23:32 <mithro> djph: I have a particular bias towards the Fomu because I wrote a lot of the workshop @ workshop.fomu.im

23:35 <hzeller> And that workshop is amazing - you install stuff on your fomu, and then connect via a usb serial to it and have a Python repl running on the processor implemented on the FPGA ... instant amaze and gratification :)

23:51 <djph> neat