I maintain the Nim packages for the Snapcraft Store for Linux. I wanted to provide a quick update.
nim-lang, nim-lang-nightly, and nim-lang-lts-1 are available as snap packages for amd64, i386, arm64, armhf, and ppc64el. Using the nim-lang-nightly snap is particularly useful for automatically always having the bleeding edge nim nightly build.
I automate the building process using GitHub Actions and cross-compile daily for the various architectures using snapcraft remote-build on Canonical's Launchpad.net. This is fully detailed in the nim_lang_snap project page. It is also covered in a now slightly outdated blog post.
Usage of the snap has been steadily increasing since its debut September 2019:
Some recent updates:
- Updated GitHub Actions builds to be more resilient when one architecture build stalls, but doesn't hard fail, so it will no longer hold up builds on other architectures for that branch. Commit. Also it now uses my Snapcraft build Docker container built on GitHub Actions (with some slight tweaks from the official Snapcraft Docker container) and hosted on GitHub Container Registry instead of Docker Hub. snap-build.
- Refreshed the nim_lang_snap project README.md to fix a few typos, add --classic flag to command line install instructions, and moved directions on snap alias handling to the top for greater visibility. One advantage of snaps is that you can have stable, nightly, and LTS installed and call them individually as nim-lang.nim, nim-lang-nightly.nim, or nim-lang-lts-1.nim. But you can also, for example, alias nim-lang-nightly.nim to simply nim, using $ sudo snap alias nim-lang.nim nim.
- Fixed a bug that caused some standard library packages not to be found in the snap under some circumstances. #11 and reported here on the forum.
- Fixed a bug which caused nimble to improperly detect the location of the nim binary in nightly and stable builds in some situations. #13.
- Added a snap binary command for nim-gdb #17.
- Retired the nim-lang-docs snap as no one was using it.
- Refreshed screenshots, descriptions, added a video from FOSDEM, added link to the forum, and added tips on snap aliasing on the Snapcraft Store listings.
Thank you for your contribution. We need to make Nim suitable for installation on as many platforms as possible.