parsav  Diff

additional preconfigure dependencies are necessary if you are building directly from trunk, rather than from a release tarball that includes certain build artifacts which need to be embedded in the binary:

* inkscape, for rendering out some of the UI graphics that can't be represented with standard svg
* cwebp (libwebp package), for transforming inkscape PNGs to webp
* sassc, for compiling the SCSS stylesheet into its final CSS

all builds require terra, which, unfortunately, requires installing an older version of llvm, v9 at the latest (which i develop parsav under). with any luck, your distro will be clever enough to package terra and its dependencies properly (it's trivial on nix, tho you'll need to tweak the terra expression to select a more recent llvm package); Arch Linux is one of those distros which is not so clever, and whose (AUR) terra package is totally broken. due to these unfortunate circumstances, terra is distributed not just in source form, but also in the the form of LLVM IR. distributions will also be made in the form of tarballed object code and assembly listings for various common platforms, currently including x86-32/64, arm7hf, aarch64, riscv, mips32/64, and ppc64/64le.

i've noticed that terra (at least with llvm9) seems to get a bit cantankerous and trigger llvm to fail with bizarre errors when you try to cross-compile parsav from x86-64 to any other platform, even x86-32. i don't know if this problem exists on other architectures or in what form, but as a workaround, the current cross-compile process consists of generating LLVM IR (ostensibly for x86-64, though this is in reality an architecture-independent language), and then compiling that down to an object file with llc. this is an enormous hassle; hopefully the terra (or llvm?) people will fix this eventually.

also note that, while parsav has a flag to build with ASAN, ASAN has proven unusable for most purposes as it routinely reports false positive buffer-heap-overflows. if you figure out how to defuckulate this, i will be overjoyed.

## building

first, either install any missing dependencies as shared libraries, or build them as static libraries with the command `make dep.$LIBRARY`. as a shortcut, `make dep` will build all dependencies as static libraries. note that if the build system finds a static version of a library in the `lib/` folder, it will use that instead of any system library. note that these commands require GNU make (it may be installed as `gmake` on your system), although this is a fairly soft dependency -- if you really need to build it on BSD make, you can probably translate it with a minute or so of work; you'll just have to do some of the various gmake functions' work manually. this may be worthwhile if you're packaging for a BSD.

additional preconfigure dependencies are necessary if you are building directly from trunk, rather than from a release tarball that includes certain build artifacts which need to be embedded in the binary:

* inkscape, for rendering out some of the UI graphics that can't be represented with standard svg
* cwebp (libwebp package), for transforming inkscape PNGs to webp
* sassc, for compiling the SCSS stylesheet into its final CSS

all builds require terra, which, unfortunately, requires installing an older version of llvm, v9 at the latest (which i develop parsav under). with any luck, your distro will be clever enough to package terra and its dependencies properly (it's trivial on nix, tho you'll need to tweak the terra expression to select a more recent llvm package); Arch Linux is one of those distros which is not so clever, and whose (AUR) terra package is totally broken. due to these unfortunate circumstances, terra is distributed not just in source form, but also in the the form of LLVM IR. 

i've noticed that terra (at least with llvm9) seems to get a bit cantankerous and trigger llvm to fail with bizarre errors when you try to cross-compile parsav from x86-64 to any other platform, even x86-32. i don't know if this problem exists on other architectures or in what form. as a workaround, i've tried generating LLVM IR (ostensibly for x86-64, though this is in reality an architecture-independent language), and then compiling that down to an object file with llc. it doesn't work. the generated binaries seem to run but they crash with bizarre errors and are impossible to debug, as llc refuses to include debug symbols. for these reasons, parsav will (almost certainly) not run on any architecture besides x86-64, at least until terra and/or llvm are fixed.

also note that, while parsav has a flag to build with ASAN, ASAN has proven unusable for most purposes as it routinely reports false positive buffer-heap-overflows. if you figure out how to defuckulate this, i will be overjoyed.

## building

first, either install any missing dependencies as shared libraries, or build them as static libraries with the command `make dep.$LIBRARY`. as a shortcut, `make dep` will build all dependencies as static libraries. note that if the build system finds a static version of a library in the `lib/` folder, it will use that instead of any system library. note that these commands require GNU make (it may be installed as `gmake` on your system), although this is a fairly soft dependency -- if you really need to build it on BSD make, you can probably translate it with a minute or so of work; you'll just have to do some of the various gmake functions' work manually. this may be worthwhile if you're packaging for a BSD.