Get Ghostty on the Zig Package Manager

[mitchellh]

Zig Version

0.11.0-dev.4404+4f6013bf5

Steps to Reproduce and Observed Behavior

You can close this if you want. I thought it might be useful to have a tracking issue of the issues that have blocked me from getting my terminal emulator using the Zig package manager in 0.11. It might be a good target for 0.11.1 (I mean, I'd love that).

I've just completed getting as far as I can. The good news is its... pretty close? Ghostty has dozens of dependencies with multiple layers of transitive shared dependencies so its a good stress test. I'm impressed I got as far as I did. And I'm very sorry I didn't do more testing before 0.11.0 (congrats!).

Update 10/1/2023: Ghostty is now able to use the package manager as of 0.12.0-dev.694+937e8cb70! See the comment for more information. This list now has additional issues we've run into but have found workarounds.

Full Blockers

These are actively preventing me from being able to use the package manager.

• Compare user input for multiple dependency build variants #16600
  • my comment: Compare user input for multiple dependency build variants #16600 (comment)

Major Issues

These are issues that have really nasty workarounds and that I hit very regularly.

• package manager: no dependency named 'X' in 'build.zig.zon'; but it is #16354
  • my comment: package manager: no dependency named 'X' in 'build.zig.zon'; but it is #16354 (comment)
• [std.http] zig build fails to download large archives from github #15342
  • my comment: [std.http] zig build fails to download large archives from github #15342 (comment)

Minor

These are issues that are easy to work around but just muck up the experience.

• std.tar: handle tar files with symbolic links #16678
• ability to fetch only needed dependencies #14597 (so that dependencies with symlinks can be ignored on Windows)
• zig package manager should retry fetching on temporary errors #17472

The Zig core team should all have access to Ghostty's source. If you don't have access let me know. Happy to provide any more details on Discord.

Expected Behavior

Down with all Git submodules.

[mitchellh]

Update, as of https://github.com/mitchellh/ghostty/pull/603 (for those who have access to the repo), Ghostty is now able to use the package manager with 0.12.0-dev.694+937e8cb70!

We can't remove all of our git submodules yet due to #16678. And even once that is fixed, we're starting to work on Windows so we'll need #14597 so that deps with symlinks are skipped on Windows.

This can potentially be closed now unless you want to keep this open until we have a workaround-free setup @andrewrk.

[andrewrk]

I'm happy to keep this open if there is a checkbox with an issue number for every workaround in your setup

[mitchellh]

Got it, the root comment is up to date on all the issues, with checkboxes.

[mitchellh]

Update: Ghostty no longer has to special-case tar files with symlinks, including the macOS SDK!

The only issue now is that on Windows we want to filter out unused dependencies. This issue is tracked as a checkbox item in the root issue.

[mitchellh]

Added #17472. We've had the Zig package manager in "production" for only a week and I find myself having to restart failed jobs a few times per day. So far all of these failed jobs have been temporary network issues, not the result of real outages.

[andrewrk]

This issue was useful while figuring out what issues to include in the 0.12.0 milestone. Now that the release is approaching, I'm going to close this and declare it a success. All the follow-up issues are tracked and assigned appropriate milestones.