Continuous Integration for Amiga

Amiga-Smalltalk now has continuous integration, I don’t know if it’s the first Amiga program ever to have CI but definitely the first I know of. Let me tell you about it.

I’ve long been using AROS, the AROS Research Operating System (formerly the A stood for Amiga) as a convenient place to (manually) test Amiga-Smalltalk. AROS will boot natively on PC but can also be “hosted” as a user-space process on Linux, Windows or macOS. So it’s handy to build a program like Amiga-Smalltalk in the AROS source tree, then launch AROS and check that my program works properly. Because AROS is source compatible with Amiga OS (and binary compatible too, on m68k), I can be confident that things work on real Amigas.

My original plan for Amiga-Smalltalk was to build a Docker image containing AROS, add my test program to S:User-startup (the script on Amiga that runs at the end of the OS boot sequence), then look to see how it fared. But when I discussed it on the aros-exec forums, AROS developer deadwood had a better idea.

He’s created AxRuntime, a library that lets Linux processes access the AROS APIs directly without having to be hosted in AROS as a sub-OS. So that’s what I’m using. You can look at my Github workflow to see how it works, but in a nutshell:

  1. check out source.
  2. install libaxrt. I’ve checked the packages in ./vendor (and a patched library, which fixes clean termination of the Amiga process) to avoid making network calls in my CI. The upstream source is deadwood’s repo.
  3. launch Xvfb. This lets the process run “headless” on the CI box.
  4. build and run ast_tests, my test runner. The Makefile shows how it’s compiled.

That’s it! All there is to running your Amiga binaries in CI.

About Graham

I make it faster and easier for you to create high-quality code.
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