FAQ
General
Q: Previously it was possible to download a single binary file. Is there any way to squeeze Hdlmake into one file and put it in /usr/bin?
A: No. The idea of creating a "binary" file was broken. Hdlmake is written in Python and there is no need to "build" it, as it gets interpreted on the fly. If you want to be able to run hdlmake conveniently, you may put a script named hdlmake in /usr/bin and call python with hdlmake's path from inside
Q: I would like to participate in Hdlmake's development. What should I do?
A: Good to hear that! In the ideal scenario you would pick a functionality/feature that is missing and propose a possible implementation in the mailing list. If you don't have a vision, you can write in the mailing list anyway.
Q: I found a bug. What should I do?
A: We would appreciate if you report your finding on the mailing list. This should include exact steps to reproduce your case and a stack trace, if there is any exception thrown at the level of Python code. We would appreciate even more if you post a possible solution to the problem :-)
Documentation
Q: Why do you use Sphinx for the documentation?
A: We chose Sphinx as the new document format for HDLMake. First of all, with the new Hdlmake 2.0 release we tried to push its usage outside CERN boundaries. In this way, in addition to expanding support to Lattice and Microsemi FPGAs, as Hdlmake is a Python tool, we adopted Sphinx as the new documentation engine because it's the de-facto standard for Python projects and communities.
Q: The documentation is at ReadTheDocs.org, should it not be at ohwr.org itself?
ReadTheDocs.org (or rtfd.org) is just a
convenient web service that is becoming the "Github" of Sphinx based
documentation. Don't worry, all the information is also conveniently
stored in the www.ohwr.org repository.
The magic of the ReadTheDocs service is that it clones your own GIT code
repository in which the target Sphinx doc is actually contained
(ohwr.org Hdlmake repo in this case) and it builds & host for free the
different documentation versions for every tag or branch you enable.
Indeed, you could even write a webhook in your GIT server so that
everytime you push a commit the new code is fetched by ReadTheDocs and
the documentation is automatically rebuilt and published (in PDF, ePub,
HTML and web format).
But of course, and this is the most important, any user is able to build
the whole doc set locally from the ohwr.org repo by just using the
standard Python Sphinx tools.
16 November 2015