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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

I assume this is mostly a mac thing? The effort to get this up and running on debian appears to be a bit more work than normal.

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I imagine package managers will start picking this up shortly since it just released publicly.

well you'll have to get a DD on board to do the work and zig isn't even in debian so that'd have to get there first and the person wanting the terminal probably doesn't want to maintain the programming language as well. So that probably means 2 DDs. Again, there is a non-normal distance here.

That seems like a very Debian problem.

Perhaps if one was inclined, Nix can provide immediate resolution, since it can be installed and used on Debian and ghostty project provides convenient flake.

Granted I'm on NixOS, but took me grand total of 60 seconds to update config and 8 minutes of actually building on a slow machine.

Non-DDs can get packages in too via the RFS process, there is a Zig package by a non-DD, not yet in Debian though.

https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers/ https://bugs.debian.org/995670

$ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git

$ cd ghostty

$ zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

$ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty

tried this doesn't work do i need some specific zig version?

0.13.0

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/4b4d4062dfed7b37...

The full script is pretty much:

$ wget https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0....

$ tar xvf zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0.tar.xz

$ git clone git@github.com:ghostty-org/ghostty.git

$ cd ghostty

$ ../zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

$ ./zig-out/bin/ghostty

Looks like there are a few deps needed:

  sudo apt install libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev git

Otherwise you'll get this error:

  error: unable to spawn glib-compile-resources: FileNotFound
  Build Summary: 78/83 steps succeeded; 2 failed (disable with --summary none)
  install transitive failure
  └─ install ghostty transitive failure
     └─ zig build-exe ghostty ReleaseFast native transitive failure
        ├─ run glib-compile-resources (ghostty_resources.c) failure
        └─ run glib-compile-resources (ghostty_resources.h) failure
  error: the following build command failed with exit code 1:
  /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty/.zig-cache/o/57acb02f2b1ccf1b03b9597a8c5f2d09/build /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0/zig /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty /home/tlhunter/Downloads/ghosttty/ghostty/.zig-cache /home/tlhunter/.cache/zig --seed 0xb4306e7d -Z11426c6f3a70c8b9 -Doptimize=ReleaseFast

```

I'm quite surprised they don't provide a .deb package as that checks off 90% of Linux users.

It's uncommon for upstream to provide .deb packages. That's not really how it's supposed to work. The Debian community creates Debian packages. Upstream's job is only to avoid making the Debian community's job more difficult than necessary. Unfortunately due to the decisions made by various popular Linux projects (mainly an obscene obsession with dynamic linking), it's not really feasible for upstreams to provide GUI applications on Linux. I hope someday this can change, but realistically there's not enough effort being put towards this goal.

Good point. I’m on pacman, but I remember installing adwaita last year when I started using Ghostty.

Zig 0.13 is required according to https://ghostty.org/docs/install/build

It also seems to need a fairly new gtk4. At least the version in Ubuntu 22.04 is too old.

Funny to see a "doesn't work" response even on Hacker News, with no details or error messages.

it's a Mac and Linux thing.

Yeah, it's not available in the Debian/Ubuntu package managers, but building from source is quite trivial.

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