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Norman Feske avatar

Goa tool under the umbrella of Genode Labs


The Goa project was started in 2019 with the ambition to streamline the workflows of application developers targeting Genode, and Sculpt OS in particular. I maintained and improved the tool off-and-on as a personal project over the years. Now, coordinated with the release of Sculpt OS 23.04, Goa has become an official Genode-Labs project.

Using Goa, application developers can rely on commodity build systems to create software for Genode. This is particularly useful for porting existing software, which often comes with project files for Autoconf, CMake, QMake, or a plain Makefile. Goa uses those existing project files and tools to create build artifacts that are compatible with Genode.

It also leverages Genode's ability to run directly on Linux to provide a testbed for application scenarios. This enables rapid development-test cycles, not only while developing application code but also for integration tasks. Finally, it assists with the publishing of the created applications in a form suitable for Genode's package management. Software created via Goa can seamlessly be installed and deployed on Sculpt OS.

The scope of the tool and the growing adoption call for multiple shoulders to carry its further evolution. To my delight, the Genode core team welcomed my suggestion to promote Goa to an official Genode-Labs project. I'm particularly grateful for Johannes taking over the lead maintainership of the project.

The new home of Goa is now the "genodelabs" organization at GitHub:

Goa project at GitHub

https://github.com/genodelabs/goa

Timed with the release of Sculpt OS, the migration of Goa has been completed. The following notes are worth sharing.

  • Existing users, please follow Goa's installation steps again, with the new home as reference. This is to ensure that Goa's update-goa command fetches updates from the right place.

  • Goa has just been updated to be binary compatible to Sculpt OS 23.04. For targetting previous versions of Sculpt, you can switch Goa to target a different release by specifying the desired version as argument to the update-goa command.

  • Goa's build and run commands use the official packages provided by "genodelabs" instead of "nfeske" now. You should update the archives and used_apis files of your existing projects accordingly.

  • For new users, I have just updated (and re-tested) my Goa article series (1, 2, 3, 4) to the current version.