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Package VCV Rack plugins

Open cbix opened this issue 3 years ago • 20 comments

Why should we package VCV Rack plugins?

  • By default, a user needs to sign up for the VCV Library in order to download and install 3rd party plugins. This may not be possible or desirable for all users.
  • Not all plugins provide pre-built binaries.
  • We can easily build plugins for aarch64, ~which is not officially supported yet by VCV~ (now supported)
  • A user can install many plugins by simply typing pacman -S vcvrack-plugins.

Plugins

This list is mostly copied from VCV Library, Cardinal sources and wiki. WIP and Done are ticked off.

cbix avatar Jul 17 '22 22:07 cbix

(i hope it's alright that i'm commenting here) just wanted to drop a line and say i added a LICENSE file to my repo, so you should be able to include my plugin in this now. thanks for raising the issue with me :)

alefnull avatar Aug 02 '22 17:08 alefnull

Thanks a lot @alefnull, also noticed there was a new release recently 🎉 I'll get at packaging a few more plugins soon hopefully :)

cbix avatar Aug 02 '22 17:08 cbix

no problem! and yeah, there will likely be some more releases in the near future too, as I've picked up a collaborator and we've only just started with the one module, but we already have others in the works. 😉

alefnull avatar Aug 02 '22 17:08 alefnull

@alefnull FYI your modules finally made it into our repo and the AUR 🎉

cbix avatar Dec 07 '22 19:12 cbix

@alefnull FYI your modules finally made it into our repo and the AUR 🎉

cool! 😀 thanks for including me!

alefnull avatar Dec 07 '22 19:12 alefnull

Hello

I believe you maintain the AUR version of VCVRack

The AUR version of VCV Rack currently appears to build in a way which results in a binary unable to load certain binaries from the VCV Rack library. Specifically, Surge XT (where I am a maintainer) doesn't load from library in the AUR rack. Also, newly, VCV Rack Free (previously Fundamental) seems not to. https://community.vcvrack.com/t/neither-surgext-nor-vcv-free-plugins-are-installing-updating-in-vcvrack-arch-linux-6-3-x/19969/42?u=baconpaul there's one such example.

This is causing a bit of a support burden for us. I currently have a FAQ which I paste into forums telling folks who want to use surge to not to use the AUR version, or to self build all of surge themselves. Most choose the former. I would say we get a user failing to use surge in rack on arch about every 8-10 days right now.

I don't run Arch so I haven't replicated this, but the rack forum (and our discord and rack discord) have quite a few similar examples. Some symbol incompatible etc... at dlopen time. You can subscribe to Surge XT in the rack library, run this rack, and you will see the red dot to upgrade never clears and you get a log message about a bad symbol.

I believe among the ways to rectify this situation you could consider the following:

  1. Use compatible libraries to the rack binary system for all your builds and test a variety of library plugins with your builds. You could do this, perhaps, using the rack docker image to do a build, or through some other mechanism. Add SurgeXT and VCV Free to your pre-release test checklist.
  2. Remove your modified vcv rack build from the AUR
  3. Make your modified vcv rack AUR download the rack binary directly from the rack downloads site rather than building
  4. Make the vcv rack AUR result in a build not able to dynamically load from the official library by patching the source
  5. Build and bundle surge xt (as well as all other broken plugins) with your package (although, of course, that wouldn't solve commercial plugins which had the same problem)
  6. Some other solution I which fits your workflow.

I hope you consider one of these, though; it is a bummer that Arch users use your package and can't use the more popular libraries.

Thank you for your attention to this matter!

baconpaul avatar Jun 04 '23 15:06 baconpaul

Thanks for the info @baconpaul, I believe the best solution here is to vendor the problematic libraries again. We previously de-vendored those that are available as dynamic libraries. I'll look into the issue at hand to figure out which libs should be statically linked. Also looking into the future, maybe one measure to reduce ABI issues would be to check for differences to the official binaries during build (check() in PKGBUILD).

cbix avatar Jun 04 '23 15:06 cbix

Wrt shipping the original binary

Make your modified vcv rack AUR download the rack binary directly from the rack downloads site rather than building

there's the vcvrack-bin package doing that and it would be against AUR guidelines to do the same in the vcvrack package.

cbix avatar Jun 04 '23 15:06 cbix

Yeah so the last time I ran arch it was called gentoo. :) I have no idea what the solution is which is why I was hesitant in my list

but appreciate you looking. Surge xt rack is a pretty easy build too (but big) so for the surge problem specifically I suppose you could go that route.

thanks!

baconpaul avatar Jun 04 '23 15:06 baconpaul

there's the vcvrack-bin package doing that and it would be against AUR guidelines to do the same in the vcvrack package.

Thank you! This is very useful. I will instruct Surge users who experience this break to try that package. Appreciated.

baconpaul avatar Jun 04 '23 15:06 baconpaul

Many thanks! As the OP in the VCVRack thread cited above by @baconpaul, I can confirm that after makepkg and makepkg --install the vcvrack-bin-git now allows me to access SurgeXT plugins after all.

However, VCVRack is now telling me (by a red dot on Help menu) to upgrade to version 2.3.0 (from the 2.2.3 bin version). Having tried to use the direct download (2.3.0) previously, I spent several hours without success (i.e., would not install the SurgeXT and VCV Free/Foundation plugins).

Question: Should I simply ignore the upgrade message and hope someone produces a bin-git version of the latest VCVRack 2.3.0 at some point?

ArchieLinux avatar Jun 04 '23 16:06 ArchieLinux

@ArchieLinux If you are logged in on aur.archlinux.org, you can leave a comment. You could try asking what is holding up the package update and/or ask whether you can offer any help.

If a package is flagged out-of-date and doesn't get an update for while, eventually somebody will come along and request the package to be orphaned so somebody else can take it over. If it has been flagged out-of-date for a while this request is usually granted.

SpotlightKid avatar Jun 04 '23 17:06 SpotlightKid

@SpotlightKid Just left such a request.

If I thought I could be of genuine help, I'd offer ;-) Still in learning mode when it comes to building packages, compiling bins, ...

ArchieLinux avatar Jun 04 '23 17:06 ArchieLinux

by the way, I'm not an arch user. The only way it seemed to create an aur account is to add the output of a pacman command, and I'm assuming zsh: pacman command not found is not what folks wanted. I don't know if anyone here can do anything about it, but perhaps an alternate way to avoid bots would allow maintainers of popular multi-platform open source packages give feedback on aur builds? any ideas?

baconpaul avatar Jun 04 '23 17:06 baconpaul

That's a stupid way to do a captcha. That wasn't there when i created my account (years ago).

We're not really the right address to complain about this, though. We're not officially affiliated with the Arch project.

SpotlightKid avatar Jun 04 '23 18:06 SpotlightKid

@baconpaul BTW, most AUR package maintainers put their email in the PKGBUILD file, which you can view from the AUR package page via a link on the upper right.

SpotlightKid avatar Jun 04 '23 18:06 SpotlightKid

well i'm not sure if it is stupid. but if the intent is to do anything other than drive away non arch users maybe it is!

thanks anyway! let me know if i can help with surge and so forth at least. and appreciate the attention here to get this subset of our users back in the water.

baconpaul avatar Jun 04 '23 18:06 baconpaul

@baconpaul BTW, most AUR package maintainers put their email in the PKGBUILD file, which you can view from the AUR package page via a link on the upper right.

thanks! I found this thread by googling the maintainer of vcvrack and finding the GitHub; an email is a better way for sure.

Appreciated

baconpaul avatar Jun 04 '23 18:06 baconpaul

@baconpaul I forgot about the issue for a while but it's fixed now for Surge XT in #535 and the latest pkgrel in this repo + AUR. If other plugins still have issues loading please let me know and ideally post the relevant part from ~/.local/share/Rack2/log.txt. In the case of Surge XT it gave the hint that a symbol from libsamplerate was missing.

I'm still not sure if statically linking everything like in the official version is the best idea, for example using system glfw enables native wayland support and IIRC rtaudio had fixed some enumeration issues in the past while Rack was still on a patched old version.

cbix avatar Feb 09 '25 22:02 cbix

thanks for the fix

as a maintainer of some semi-complicated open source software which runs on lots of platforms, i have a definite point of view about the vendor/devendor thing (or as I often say, a way to address the question "if I change all your build flags and use different source and dont tell you, do you think your software will work" - chuckle).

But glad you got it working! Most of our users have been happy with vcvrack-bin as well but i'm glad to know i can point folks here if they use the non-bin one and it will work. Appreciate it!

baconpaul avatar Feb 09 '25 23:02 baconpaul