Addon Build Guide

1st Official Post

    Is the a new guide for building addons for LE? Im looking at building dolphin 5.0 for LE. Chemster built the dolphin emu over in the openelec forums. Ive never compiled an addon before. Ive looked for a tutorial but cant find a recent one. Any help would be great.

    Im not reinventing the wheel. There is no guide to building addons for either Openelec or Libreelec. Installing an old broken addon wont get anyone any closer to being able to build working addons for libreelec.

    OK then can you give me an example of where id find this information or an addon that i can use as an example? Everything im finding is years old or been removed. I cant find anything in libreelec forums or the wiki. Ive searched the Openelec forums and wiki, the wiki page has been removed and the forums are full of old information thats out of date.

    • Official Post

    The LE/OE build-system is relatively simple to figure out (very logical) and full of "prior art" to crib and learn the process of extending the core OS and creating add-ons from. There have never been nicely written guides or tutorials because creating packages/add-ons requires developer skills, and people with the skills to succeed tend to poke about and ask a few specific questions, while those who do not have the skills (self included, I'm no developer) need to ask for tutorials and guides. Unfortunately, to package an entire Linux distro in two files requires greater up-front complexity in the creation process compared to a more conventional distro, and it raises the entry-bar on tinkering.

    Quote from stuCONNERS


    You could of saved time by just saying there isnt any.


    You want tutorial? In this case you are out of luck. Mostly because no one is taking time to make a wiki note. As usually it is mostly take actions and not giving back

    There is OE wiki entry and also this. But outdated.
    Just start looking how other addons are made and start working on yours. If this is to hard then I assume whole addon idea is to hard for you also.

    Hey guys I've been trying to get chemstar's openelec dolphin addon to work. I'm still learning compiling and getting it all wrong.

    Chemstar's addon needs updating and I think its beyond my capabilities.
    I can't find any git of chemstars addon but his addons can be found Here

    If you try and run the emulator from terminal you get

    Quote

    dolphin-emu: error while loading shared libraries: libavcodec.so.56: cannot open shared object file: No such file or di
    rectory


    So I'm guessing it needs rebuilding with updated libs. I'm running 17 alpha 2 not sure if that's relevant but the last time I Had the addon workin was openelec 15.2

    If anyone one could update chemstar's addon that would be great. I'll keep messing with it and see if I can fix it. But I wouldn't hold your breath I'm not a coder :(

    Looking at the dependencies it requires enet, libao, openal, soundtouch and wxgtk all of which are not currently packaged. Those packages likely have other dependencies as well. And then it uses cmake which can be challenging. Since there is no source available, I'm guessing that he simply zipped up all the binaries and libraries from some other distribution like many others have done when creating addons.

    I've been thinking about creating a small tutorial with the basics, but every time I think about what to put in it I think the same thing as chewitt. Learning the basics is easy and fast by looking at other addons. However, you won't get very far with the basics. A lot of packages require patching to be able to cross compile correctly. You'll need to learn what autoconf is, how the cross compiling toolchain is set up, and what a makefile does. That means spending hours upon hours trying and failing until you get it working.

    It turns out packaging Dolphin was easier than expected. It's buildsystem fetches and builds most of the dependencies by itself and links them statically to the binary. The only packages that needed packaging was portaudio (needed for mic support) and openal-soft (i think you can probably build without it). The rest was already in LibreELEC or available in the package tree.

    You can find my package here. It can easily be turned into an addon, all it needs is an addon() function to populate the addon with the additional libraries, binaries and the resources Kodi needs to launch it.

    Wow top stuff as usual escalade! I'm still very much learning so I couldnt even attempt making an addon. But this paves the way for someone to create one. I'll keep researching and playing (Im a carpenter by trade) so coding is very new to me. But I am a hobbyist :)

    I don't know any programming languages either, this is all scripting and packaging. I've been using Linux since around 1995 though, and at that time if you wanted to do anything useful you'd need to compile some stuff and read manuals. Lots and lots of manuals. Because no google and no damn internet These days people tend to give up if there isn't a youtube video lol

    Edited once, last by escalade (August 16, 2016 at 9:12 PM).