[Pkg-electronics-devel] Bug#1142611: arduino-cli: Load system provided builtin tools

[Nicolas Peugnet]

Hi,

On Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:56:07 +0200 Nicolas Peugnet <nicolas at club1.fr> wrote:
> Package: arduino-cli
> Version: 1.5.1-1
> Severity: normal
> 
> Arduino CLI needs some additional binary tools to be installed to work
> properly. Currently, these tools are installed automatically from an
> Arduino-managed repository. This is not ideal from Debian's point of vue
> as we prefer to provide all the binaries ourselves. Also, these tools
> were not compiled for all the architectures that Debian supports, which
> makes arduino-cli unusable on some architectures.
> 
> I made an initial patch that does this, by loading the tools directly
> from /usr/libexec/arduino. [1] We now need to package the 5 needed tools,
> so I created this bug to track this.
> 
> Here are the list of needed tools (the versions are not important, but I
> kept them to demonstrate the required layout):
> 
> /usr/local/libexec/arduino/
> └── builtin
>     └── tools
>         ├── ctags
>         │   └── 5.8-arduino11
>         │       └── ctags
>         ├── dfu-discovery
>         │   └── 0.1.2
>         │       ├── dfu-discovery
>         │       └── LICENSE.txt
>         ├── mdns-discovery
>         │   └── 1.0.9
>         │       ├── LICENSE.txt
>         │       └── mdns-discovery
>         ├── serial-discovery
>         │   └── 1.4.0
>         │       ├── LICENSE.txt
>         │       └── serial-discovery
>         └── serial-monitor
>             └── 0.13.0
>                 ├── LICENSE.txt
>                 └── serial-monitor
> 
> I started with mdns-discovery, for which I created the package
> "arduino-mdns-discovery". I pushed this work in the go-team [2], but
> we might want to move them to the debian-electronics team.
> 
> Most of them are written in Go, but some (at least ctags) are in C.
> 
> [1]: https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/arduino/arduino-cli/-/commits/n-peugnet/system-builtin-tools
> [2]: https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/packages/arduino-mdns-discovery
> 
> See also: https://github.com/arduino/arduino-cli/issues/3106


All of the builtin tools needed for arduino-cli are now packaged in 
Debian so I pushed [0b538d3] to the debian/latest branch.

[0b538d3]: 
https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/arduino/arduino-cli/-/commit/0b538d3b75fe74f3797bd2c7b90fb7aac45e9dc5

We now have the following tree:

/usr/libexec/arduino/builtin/tools/
├── ctags
│   └── 5.8-arduino11-5
│       └── ctags -> ../../../../../../bin/arduino-ctags
├── dfu-discovery
│   └── 0.1.2+ds1-1
│       └── dfu-discovery
├── mdns-discovery
│   └── 1.1.0+ds1-1+b1
│       └── mdns-discovery
├── serial-discovery
│   └── 1.5.2+ds1-1
│       └── serial-discovery
└── serial-monitor
     └── 0.15.0+ds1-1
         └── serial-monitor

And the tools are correctly loaded:

$ arduino-cli core list --log
INFO[0000] arduino-cli version 1.5.1
INFO[0000] Using config file: /home/nicolas/.arduino15/arduino-cli.yaml
INFO[0000] Checking signature 
index=/home/nicolas/.arduino15/package_index.json 
signatureFile=/home/nicolas/.arduino15/package_index.json.sig trusted=true
INFO[0000] Loading hardware from: /home/nicolas/.arduino15/packages
INFO[0000] Loading tools from dir: /usr/libexec/arduino/builtin/tools
INFO[0000] Loaded tool tool="builtin:ctags at 5.8-arduino11-5"
INFO[0000] Loaded tool tool="builtin:dfu-discovery at 0.1.2+ds1-1"
INFO[0000] Loaded tool tool="builtin:mdns-discovery at 1.1.0+ds1-1+b1"
INFO[0000] Loaded tool tool="builtin:serial-discovery at 1.5.2+ds1-1"
INFO[0000] Loaded tool tool="builtin:serial-monitor at 0.15.0+ds1-1"
INFO[0000] Loading libraries index file 
index=/home/nicolas/.arduino15/library_index.json
INFO[0000] Adding libraries dir dir=/home/nicolas/Arduino/libraries 
isSingleLibrary=false location=user
INFO[0000] Executing `arduino-cli core list`
No platforms installed.


So now I created [MR3] to support more archs and build arduino-cli only 
for the supported ones.

[MR3}: 
https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/arduino/arduino-cli/-/merge_requests/3
-- 
Nicolas Peugnet
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