Packaging Anki Desktop for aarch64 Alpine Linux (Postmarket OS)

Development
1

Dear Damien,

first of all, thanks for creating Anki. I’ve been using it for ~6 years now, and it’s so brilliant, I can’t imagine how I would live without it!

Background:
So far I’ve used AnkiDroid on my phone, but recently I bought a Pinephone and I would like to run Anki on it. I’ve already created a package for 2.1.15 (without rust, using Makefiles) and it works really well on my phone and it’s already in the alpine repos. But since there have been >20 new versions since then, I think I’ll eventually have to support the newest build system. I haven’t worked with bazel until now, and I’m stunned by its complexity.
I’m using the latest version from git, because according to [1] you’ve already improved the support for new platforms.

Problem description:
I’m currently stuck at the very beginning. I run scripts/build but it tries to download node (npm?) from the internet. I have node and npm installed from the alpine repos, but I can’t figure out for the live of me how to convince bazel to use the local version from /usr/bin. I’ve looked at ./docs/new-platform.md and [2] but it seems that that is referring to a version that is installed in a subdirectory of bazel’s workspace, but not system-wide. Do you have any idea how this could be achieved?

[1] Compiling Anki 2.1.38 for Raspberry Pi 4/400 with Ubuntu 20.10 (architecture: aarch64)
[2] rules_nodejs - Installation

2

The following happens, when I run bazel build -s //qt:runanki:

Extracting Bazel installation...
Starting local Bazel server and connecting to it...
WARNING: Download from https://mirror.bazel.build/nodejs.org/dist/v12.13.0/node-v12.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz failed: class com.google.devtools.build.lib.bazel.repository.downloader.UnrecoverableHttpException GET returned 404 Not Found
INFO: Repository npm instantiated at:
  /home/mo/devel/anki/anki-git/WORKSPACE:14:11: in <toplevel>
  /home/mo/devel/anki/anki-git/defs.bzl:46:17: in setup_deps
  /home/mo/.cache/bazel/_bazel_mo/fc6a139e9313e614fa176974ac4b2179/external/build_bazel_rules_nodejs/index.bzl:74:18: in yarn_install
Repository rule yarn_install defined at:
  /home/mo/.cache/bazel/_bazel_mo/fc6a139e9313e614fa176974ac4b2179/external/build_bazel_rules_nodejs/internal/npm_install/npm_install.bzl:463:31: in <toplevel>
ERROR: An error occurred during the fetch of repository 'npm':
   Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "/home/mo/.cache/bazel/_bazel_mo/fc6a139e9313e614fa176974ac4b2179/external/build_bazel_rules_nodejs/internal/npm_install/npm_install.bzl", line 440, column 13, in _yarn_install_impl
                fail("pre_process_package_json.js failed: \nSTDOUT:\n%s\nSTDERR:\n%s" % (result.stdout, result.stderr))
Error in fail: pre_process_package_json.js failed: 
STDOUT:

STDERR:
ERROR: no such package '@npm//@bazel/labs': pre_process_package_json.js failed: 
STDOUT:

STDERR:
INFO: Elapsed time: 53.514s
INFO: 0 processes.
FAILED: Build did NOT complete successfully (0 packages loaded)
3

The following link works:
https://nodejs.org/dist/v12.13.0/node-v12.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz

but not:
https://mirror.bazel.build/nodejs.org/dist/v12.13.0/node-v12.13.0-linux-arm64.tar.xz

So, bazel is trying to download from its own mirror, which is incomplete. Or so I assume. :frowning:

And also: Issuing a manual npm install works as well. (Alpine is on npm 6.14.9)

4

I’m afraid it’s not trivial to support Alpine Linux - you’ll need to patch rules_rust to add musl support to start with, and it may not be easy.

1 Like
5

Thanks for updating the docs! It now works with my locally installed node. :partying_face:

But, you are right about musl and rust. And I’m afraid I’m not the one to solve that. So, I will give up for now on alpine. The way forward for me is probably to switch to a glibc based distro for my phone (Manjaro/Arch) and try building on that one.

Again: Thanks for your support and of course for the invaluable Anki itself!

1 Like
6

Oh, and BTW: Anki Desktop works surprisingly well on a phone sized screen. :+1: