Calling vesc_tool from the Makefiles fails on some systems

[lukash]

E.g. on Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS, a report from Siwoz on discord:

System setup:

 sudo apt update &&                \
 sudo apt upgrade -y &&            \
 sudo apt dist-upgrade -y &&       \
 sudo apt install -y               \
       git                         \
       make                        \
       libqt5gui5                  \
       libsdl2-2.0-0               \
       libgles2-mesa-dev           \

Build command:

cd ~/ &&                                                       \
git clone https://github.com/vedderb/vesc_pkg.git &&           \
cp /mnt/c/Users/slims/Downloads/vesc_tool_6.02 ~/vesc_tool &&  \
cd ~/vesc_pkg &&                                               \
make VESC_TOOL=~/vesc_tool

Error:

siwoz@Simon:~/vesc_pkg$ make VESC_TOOL=~/vesc_tool
make -C balance
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/siwoz/vesc_pkg/balance'
make -C balance
make[2]: Entering directory '/home/siwoz/vesc_pkg/balance/balance'
/home/siwoz/vesc_tool --xmlConfToCode conf/settings.xml
Done!
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/siwoz/vesc_pkg/balance/balance'
/home/siwoz/vesc_tool --buildPkg "balance.vescpkg:balance.lisp:ui.qml:0:README.md:Balance"
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not find the Qt platform plugin "offscreen" in ""
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: xcb.

Aborted
make[1]: *** [Makefile:6: balance.vescpkg] Error 134
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/siwoz/vesc_pkg/balance'
make: *** [Makefile:11: balance] Error 2 

Calling vesc_tool directly like this worked:

cd /home/siwoz/vesc_pkg/balance/balance && /home/siwoz/vesc_tool --xmlConfToCode conf/settings.xml

Seems there's a difference in env, perhaps something like export QT_PLUGIN_PATH could help, the thread on discord died off. Posting here the findings so far, so that someone else may have an easier time debugging this. Does not reproduce on my system.

[tcm0116]

I spent some time recently creating a Dockerfile and devcontainer for building the VESC Tool and the packages. So far, it can build the Linux and Windows builds of VESC Tool and it can build the packages. It should be straight forward enough to extend it to build the Android version of VESC Tool, but I'm not as sure about the Mac and iOS versions.

If there's interest, I can share this Dockerfile and devcontainer as I think it would help streamline the build process and could when be adapted to allowing for automated builds.

[lukash]

The issue with automated builds is you need to build VESC Tool first or store the build somewhere. I've solved this now in Refloat by using the Nix build system and GitHub actions that use the GitHub cache to store the VESC Tool build.

https://github.com/lukash/refloat/blob/main/.github/workflows/create_release.yml
https://github.com/lukash/refloat/blob/main/.github/actions/build/action.yml

A couple other people already created some Dockerfiles for this too, they're somewhere on Discord, I don't think I'd be able to find them easily...

This particular issue is no longer a problem on 6.05 by the way.

I have my own development setup on Nix OS (though I wasn't able to build for Android yet, and I'd like to), but the containers could be useful for others.