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1465 :: Issue with Nimble dependency

• andrea (orginal) [2015-07-21T17:18:53+02:00] view original

  I am trying to write a project that depends on my own project linalg at version 0.1.2.

  I have put the obvious dependency in Nimble Requires: "nim >= 0.11.2,linalg >= 0.1.2". Here is the repository on Github. Everything seems fine, but nimble fails with

  FAILURE: Downloaded package's version does not satisfy requested version range: wanted >= 0.1.2 got 0.1.1.
  Run

  I cannot see anything wrong - what can I do?

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• def (orginal) [2015-07-21T17:37:13+02:00] view original

  Just an idea, but nimble might use your cublas branch instead of master. If so, sounds like a bug.

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• andrea (orginal) [2015-07-21T18:37:02+02:00] view original

  I assumed that Nimble would checkout the appropriate tag, like

  git clone https://github.com/unicredit/linear-algebra.git
  git checkout 0.1.2
  Run

  If so, the tag itself specifies a precise commit in the history, hence there is no need to find out what branch to use (in fact, the commit may not even be on a named branch, or it may be in the past history of multiple branches).

  But again, I am not sure what Nimble does exactly to checkout a version

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• dom96 (orginal) [2015-07-21T19:08:59+02:00] view original

  Nimble downloads the latest tagged version. In your repo that is the 0.1.2 tag, but the .nimble file specifies that the version is 0.1.1 which is wrong. You need to bump the version in the nimble file before tagging it.

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• andrea (orginal) [2015-07-21T23:53:51+02:00] view original

  Thank you, I will fix that. I followed the documentation that says that the version should be incremented after the git tag. You may want to fix the developer markdown file, or add some explanation in case I misunderstood.

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• dom96 (orginal) [2015-07-22T01:43:28+02:00] view original

  Where in the developer markdown file is this stated?

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• andrea (orginal) [2015-07-22T09:59:20+02:00] view original

  It's here in the description of the version field.

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• andrea (orginal) [2015-07-22T10:56:45+02:00] view original

  By the way, although I am sure that Nimble covers all the use cases I need, I found the documentation a little confusing. One of the points is about versioning, as above. But there are other small things that were (are) not clear to me - I take this opportunity to give a little feedback. Of course, I am willing to help, as soon as I understand these things myself. :-)

  1. The first thing that is not clear is the developers.markdown file. Since nimble is a tool for developers anyway, I thought that this file was aimed at people who want to develop nimble itself. It turns out it is aimed at library authors
  2. But this is also slightly confusing, because even if you want to write a final executable, you will have to understand the .nimble file in order to specify your dependencies
  3. The typical thing that I want to do as an executable author is to, well, actually produce this executable. If I understand correctly, this is the point of nimble build. But this forces debug mode. So maybe it is nimble c, or maybe it is nimble build but specifying the release option inside nim.cfg. The documentation for nimble build also mentions nimble install, but the latter seems to do a completely unrelated thing (install the package globally for the final user)
  4. As a library author, I will have no executable to build, so I will probably have some tests. But I cannot add the test as an executable in the .nimble file, since I do not want the tests to be distributed. What I would need is some way to be able to use nimble to build the tests, while still not distributing the tests together with the library. What I am doing right now is to put the tests in SkipDirs and use plain nim to build the tests, but I am sure there is a better way
  5. It is not clear what is the relation between the .nimble file and the nim.cfg file, if any. I am not sure whether it is possible to specify options for the nim compiler inside the .nimble file. I see that I can pass the on the command line when using nimble c, but possibly not when using other commands, such as nimble build.

  Please, do not take these comments negatively. I think nimble is a great tool, but I think that a lot can be done, in terms of documentation, to streamline the common tasks (build an executable, run tests, depend on libraries, pass options to nim)

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• dom96 (orginal) [2015-07-23T00:35:55+02:00] view original

  Thank you for the feedback! I want to make Nimble as great as possible, so any feedback (but especially detailed like yours) helps.

  1,2. I agree - https://github.com/nim-lang/nimble/issues/132

  3. nimble build will produce the executable for you, nimble install will produce the executable and install it.
  4. That is the current way I would do it. My projects have a nim.cfg file with a --path:../src option in it, so that my tests use the library in the parent dir, not the Nimble-installed one. If you have suggestions on how to make it better then do tell.
  5. .nimble has no relation to nim.cfg files. Nimble reads the former, Nim compiler reads the latter. They don't interact.

  I agree that a lot can be done. I've got lots of issues in Nimble's issue tracker, please take a look at them. If you have ideas on how to fix/improve anything then please make issues on Nimble's issue tracker.

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