Amiga-Smalltalk now has continuous integration, I don’t know if it’s the first Amiga program ever to have CI but definitely the first I know of. Let me tell you about it.
I’ve long been using AROS, the AROS Research Operating System (formerly the A stood for Amiga) as a convenient place to (manually) test Amiga-Smalltalk. AROS will boot natively on PC but can also be “hosted” as a user-space process on Linux, Windows or macOS. So it’s handy to build a program like Amiga-Smalltalk in the AROS source tree, then launch AROS and check that my program works properly. Because AROS is source compatible with Amiga OS (and binary compatible too, on m68k), I can be confident that things work on real Amigas.
My original plan for Amiga-Smalltalk was to build a Docker image containing AROS, add my test program to S:User-startup (the script on Amiga that runs at the end of the OS boot sequence), then look to see how it fared. But when I discussed it on the aros-exec forums, AROS developer deadwood had a better idea.
He’s created AxRuntime, a library that lets Linux processes access the AROS APIs directly without having to be hosted in AROS as a sub-OS. So that’s what I’m using. You can look at my Github workflow to see how it works, but in a nutshell:
- check out source.
- install libaxrt. I’ve checked the packages in
./vendor(and a patched library, which fixes clean termination of the Amiga process) to avoid making network calls in my CI. The upstream source is deadwood’s repo. - launch Xvfb. This lets the process run “headless” on the CI box.
- build and run
ast_tests, my test runner. The Makefile shows how it’s compiled.
That’s it! All there is to running your Amiga binaries in CI.
