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Add binaries to the releases?

Open
#550 4 comments 4 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
32/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
github, ocaml

Research direction

Start with the existing build process and the linked GitHub releases page, then review how opam/OCaml builds are produced for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Done means usable hyperkit and vpnkit binaries are added to releases for those platforms without requiring users to reproduce the fragile local build process.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Would like to use hyperkit & vpnkit for a microvm project, but I've found getting this built is harder on Windows than it is on Mac and Linux.

The entire build process seems a bit messy right now, making it really hard for an outsider to make use of this tool. Also cygwin only has opam 2.0.0 available, so it makes build consistency non-existent between platforms.

I'm currently at the point I've been trying to build opam 2.1.1 from source with windows/cygwin and I don't think it's going to work. My github action has been running for a couple hours now.

Could we just get the hyperkit binaries added to the releases for windows/mac/linux? It seems likely that the build will continue to break as opam/ocaml fail to produce consistent results as those projects evolve. In my case, I would like to spend more time testing cool ideas than living in build/dependency hell (which is where I am right now 😢 ).


Edit: As of now I've given up on making builds of vpnkit. I'm just ripping it from the Docker Desktop installers for now.

curl -sLo Docker.dmg https://desktop.docker.com/mac/main/amd64/Docker.dmg
hdiutil attach Docker.dmg
cp /Volumes/Docker/Docker.app/Contents/Resources/bin/com.docker.vpnkit ./vpnkit
umount /Volumes/Docker
xattr -c ./vpnkit
codesign --remove-signature ./vpnkit

brew install p7zip
curl -sLo DockerDesktopInstaller.exe https://desktop.docker.com/win/main/amd64/Docker%20Desktop%20Installer.exe
7z -oextracted-docker-files x DockerDesktopInstaller.exe
mv extracted-docker-files/resources/vpnkit.exe ./vpnkit.exe
rm -rf extracted-docker-files

Regarding the Linux binary, I'll probably just pull that from djs55/vpnkit and relinking it.

Dominant language
OCaml
Stars
1.2k
Forks
214
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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