Installing gavrasm on Arch
Avra, the AVR assembler that I have been using for my ECE375 assignments, started throwing cryptic error messages such as “PRAGMA directives currently ignored” from an include file which had previously been working fine.
In order to sanity check whether the problem is in my code or the compiler, I installed gavrasm, the assembler which the ECE375 lab website recommends for Mac users.
I wrote this up because I couldn’t find a simple, no-extra-thinking-required walkthrough of how to build and install gavrasm.
Broken pkgbuild
gavrasm is available in the AUR, but its pkgbuild is broken:
$ yaourt -S gavrasm
==> Downloading gavrasm PKGBUILD from AUR...
x PKGBUILD
Comment by fatmike (2011-09-30 09:26)
Updated and moved fpc to makedepends.
gavrasm 3.3-1 (Mon Jul 25 01:43:11 PDT 2011)
( Unsupported package: Potentially dangerous ! )
==> gavrasm dependencies:
- fpc (already installed)
==> Continue building gavrasm ? [Y/n]
==> ---------------------------------
==>
==> Building and installing package
==> ERROR: Missing package() function in
/tmp/yaourt-tmp-username/aur-gavrasm/./PKGBUILD
==> ERROR: Makepkg was unable to build gavrasm.
==> Restart building gavrasm ? [y/N]
==> --------------------------------
==>
Installing from Source
Install fpc, the Free Pascal Compiler:
$ yaourt -S fpc
Download and unzip the source. Files will end up in a directory with a name like Sourcefiles_v3_4, rather than a sensible name like gavrasm, by default.
Copy the language file to its correct location. If you want the English version, this is:
$ cp gavrlang_en.pas gavrlang.pas
If you forget this step, you’ll hit an error when compiling:
gavrline.pas(9,28) Fatal: Can't find unit gavrlang used by gavrline
Once you’ve copied the language file, you’re ready to compile:
$ fpc gavrasm.pas
In order to invoke gavrasm from the command line, copy the resulting executable into a directory on your $PATH:
$ sudo cp gavrasm /usr/bin/
That’s it! You can now compile assembly with $ gavrasm myfile.asm anywhere on your system!