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

[Christopher Obbard]

Hi Nicolas,

On Wed, 22 Jul 2026 at 20:07, 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

I think it makes sense to create ITPs under the go-team.

Let me know if you need sponsorship...

Cheers!

Chris