[Pkg-electronics-devel] Arduino packaging in 2020

[Thomas L. Kjeldsen]

Hi,
I am new to this project so just wanted to introduce myself.

I have been playing with the Arduino IDE on Raspbian Linux and was
wondering what it would take to establish a Debian packaging effort such
that one can simply run `apt install arduino` on Debian Linux and Raspbian
to install/update a fairly recent version of the Arduino tools.

If you do that today you will end up with a version from 2013 that is no
longer supported by upstream.

Judging from activity on mailing lists, github issues and
https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/arduino it looks like there has
been lots of interest and efforts made to package a more recent version of
Arduino.

As far as I can tell, the latest effort was blocked due to a dependency on
a library called "MrBean":
https://github.com/HuayraLinux/pkg-arduino/issues/4

I did some experiments with the Arduino IDE source code to get rid of that
dependency. The PR was recently accepted by upstream so "MrBean" is no
longer a blocker.

Looking forward, I think it would be valuable to check out the Arduino
packaging effort in Arch Linux:
https://www.archlinux.org/packages/?q=arduino

Specifically, I think it is worth to consider making the Debian package
"arduino-core" obsolete and replace it with a new one called
"arduino-avr-core" similar to what has been done in Arch Linux. The
motivation is that the majority of that content is now released in a
separate project: https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr and also that
it has value to be aligned with other packaging efforts.

Is this the right forum to have discussions like this?


Best regards,
  Thomas
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