Official packaging for Raspberry Pi OS Lite?

[sockbot]

I'd like to be able to run nchat with WhatsApp support on the Raspberry Pi, particularly the Pi 0 which is ARMv6. There is a mobile device based on the Pi 0 called Beepy that would be a great platform to run nchat while mobile: https://beepy.sqfmi.com/

The screen supports 15x50 characters.

I have already attempted to build nchat on the Pi 0 itself and it compiles, but I get a segmentation fault when I try to setup WhatsApp with no other error information logged to console.

[d99kris]

Hi @sockbot - I currently don't have a Pi 0 to debug, but I'll see if I can get my hands on one. I do run nchat on a Pi 4 (remotely via SSH) regularly. I think the code base should be portable to other ARM platforms, but it's possible there's some bug.

Could you check if there's any error or warning in ~/.nchat/log.txt after you encounter the crash?

Also, if you don't mind helping to debug, you could try run nchat through a debugger and capture a backtrace where it crashes. Something like this:

gdb ./build/bin/nchat
run -s
# select whatsapp and enter some phone number
# wait until it crashes and you get the (gdb) prompt
bt
quit

Finally, there's currently some limitations for nchat's whatsapp setup, it requires a X display OR a terminal size of 61x32 to display its QR code (to be scanned by a phone). It shouldn't however crash even if those requirements are not met. But the QR code may not display correctly. I'll look into whether there's possibility of non-QR-code setup. I saw the underlying library whatsmeow recently added capabilities for something that seems like that in tulir/whatsmeow#419 but it's not yet integrated into nchat, and I'm not sure it will allow text-only setup, I'll need to confirm/test that.

[sockbot]

I figured out the problem-- I had manually copied the nchat binary to my /usr/local, rather than using the make install command to move the dependencies over. I got it to work by displaying the QR code by doing the setup via SSH on my laptop screen.

The software is technically working now without issue!

From this point, I'd like to get your thoughts on making ARMv6 an officially supported platform. Other than having a Pi 0 or a Raspberry Pi 1 as your ARMv6 testing device, are there any blockers?

[d99kris]

Great to hear you found the issue!

This project is still fairly small (only me working on it) and so currently I only have bandwidth to test on the devices / OS'es I use on regular basis (macOS ARM, Ubuntu ARM, Ubuntu Intel) . Pi 0 can be officially supported in same fashion as all other Unix-like platforms, in the sense that I'll try fix any bugs reported by users, but I will probably not be able to test it myself on continuous basis even if I had a device. There's just too many architectures/distros to to cover if I'm going to cover to user base. 🙂

Not sure if this answers your question, or are you more wondering about official packaging on the platform?

[sockbot]

I think I'd be happy if there were just an official packaging on the platform. I do know that it will need to be built for ARMv6 in order to work with the Pi 0 so if you don't have one it will need to be cross compiled. However, it should run on your Pi 4, right?

[d99kris]

Ok, I see. Currently packaging for different distros / package-managers are not in the scope for this project, but anyone who wish to package nchat for some platform are of course very welcome to do so. Currently it's just me maintaining nchat and I try to focus my (little) free time on maintaining it, rather than packaging it.