Clickable February Update

Published February 27, 2019 in The Voyage of a Software Developer by Brian Douglass
Filed under Clickable, Releases

There has been a ton of development on Clickabe over the last month followed by several released versions. Most of this development effort is thanks to Jonatan Zeidler who has joined the Clickable team.

Version 5.5.0 brought some improvements to build-libs so that it uses the same arch as the main package build and you can specify only one library to build or clean. The GOPATH support was updated to include support for the GOPATH env variable being a list of paths. Clickable itself will now exit with an error rather than a warning if you try to run an invalid command.

Version 5.5.1 came out with some new features including support for a --config argument to Clickable which allows you to specify a different path to your clickable.json file. There is a new configuration option called clickable_minimum_required that allows you to specify a minimum required version of Clickable to use when compiling your app. Another new configuration option is make_args which allows passing arguments directly to the make command during the build phase.

Version 5.6.0 came with a bug fix for Cordova builds and added support for the --debug-build argument to QMake and CMake templates. Quickly after that release came version 5.6.1 which fixed a bug in the library build process and added support for --debug-build for Cordova templates.

Version 5.7.0 was released with better dependency support. The configuration options dependencies and specificDependencies have been deprecated and replaced with dependencies_target and dependencies_build. dependencies_target are for installing app dependencies in the custom docker container. These dependencies will be installed in the target arch (ie: libxyz:armhf). dependencies_build are for installing build dependencies in the custom docker container. These dependencies will not be installed in the target architecture.

Version 5.8.0 is the latest release of Clickable that expands version 5.7.0’s changes to dependencies by adding a new configuration option: dependencies_ppa. This option allows listing several PPAs that have your required dependencies. These PPAs will automatically be added to the custom docker container for your app. For Rust apps, the CARGO_HOME option now defaults to ~/.cargo. Additionally the schema for specifying libraries has changed (the old way is still supported but is now deprecated).

If you run into any issues with Clickable please report them in the GitLab Issues.