iverilog/msys2

MSYS2 build recipe

This directory contains a PKGBUILD recipe for building Icarus Verilog in MSYS2. MSYS2 is a collection of tools and libraries for Windows that is closely based on the packaging approach in Arch Linux. The package manager in MSYS2 is a port of pacman. Therefore the structure of PKGBUILD recipes in MSYS2 is very similar to that in Arch Linux and the build script (makepkg-mingw) is a port of makepkg.

Other than that, PKGBUILD files are shell scripts containing some specific functions (build, package, check, etc.) and metadata (variables). The build system takes care of dependencies, creating temporary directories, generating a tarball, etc. Therefore, the recommended approach for building Icarus Verilog on Windows is the following:

# Install the base development tools
pacman -S base-devel

# Retrieve the Icarus Verilog sources. Optionally, retrieve a tarball, or a
# specific branch/version.
git clone https://github.com/steveicarus/iverilog
cd iverilog

# Call makepkg-mingw from the directory 'msys2'. It will install dependencies,
# build, check, and package Icarus Verilog.
cd msys2
makepkg-mingw --noconfirm --noprogressbar -sCLf

# Optionally, install the tarball(s)/package(s). Or just distribute it/them.
pacman -U --noconfirm *.zst

Additional configuration options can be passed to the configuration step by setting the environment variable IVL_CONFIG_OPTIONS before calling makepkg-mingw, e.g.

export IVL_CONFIG_OPTIONS=-"-enable-suffix=-devel --enable-libvvp"

NOTE: the continuous integration workflow in [github.com/steveicarus/iverilog] (https://github.com/steveicarus/iverilog) uses the above procedure for building Icarus Verilog for Windows each time a commit is pushed or a pull request is updated. The generated packages are uploaded as artifacts. Hence, users willing to test development builds or specific features, can download and install the tarballs from the corresponding CI run.

Nevertheless, the content of functions build and check in the PKGBUILD file should be familiar to any user willing to build iverilog manually. Those can be executed in a shell (ignoring makepkg), as long as the few environment variables are properly defined.