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# Packaging Nim

This page provide hints on distributing Nim using OS packages.

See distros for tools to detect Linux distribution at runtime.

See here for how to compile reproducible builds.

# Supported architectures

Nim runs on a wide variety of platforms. Support on amd64 and i386 is tested regularly, while less popular platforms are tested by the community.

- amd64
- arm64 (aka aarch64)
- armel
- armhf
- i386
- m68k
- mips64el
- mipsel
- powerpc
- ppc64
- ppc64el (aka ppc64le)
- riscv64

The following platforms are rarely tested:

- alpha
- hppa
- ia64
- mips
- s390x
- sparc64

# Packaging for Linux

See https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/labels/Installation for installation-related bugs.

Build Nim from the released tarball at https://nim-lang.org/install_unix.html It is different from the GitHub sources as it contains Nimble, C sources & other tools.

The Debian package ships bash and ksh completion and manpages that can be reused.

Hints on the build process:

    # build from C sources and then using koch
    make -j   # supports parallel build
    # alternatively: ./build.sh --os $os_type --cpu $cpu_arch
    ./bin/nim c -d:release koch
    ./koch boot -d:release

    # optionally generate docs into doc/html
    ./koch docs

    ./koch tools

    # extract files to be really installed
    ./install.sh <tempdir>

    # also include the tools
    for fn in nimble nimsuggest nimgrep; do cp ./bin/$fn <tempdir>/nim/bin/; done

What to install:

- The expected stdlib location is `/usr/lib/nim/lib`, previously it was just `/usr/lib/nim`
- `nimdoc.css` and `nimdoc.cls` from the `doc` folder should go into `/usr/lib/nim/doc/`
- `tools/debug/nim-gdb.py` should go into `/usr/lib/nim/tools/`
- `tools/dochack/dochack.js` should be installed to `/usr/lib/nim/tools/dochack/`
- Global configuration files under `/etc/nim`
- Optionally: manpages, documentation, shell completion
- When installing documentation, .idx files are not required
- The "compiler" directory contains compiler sources and should not be part of the compiler binary package