nordisk/dwarves

Clone dwarves and build it — on a machine that has nothing else

git clone dwarves && cargo build DOES NOT WORK, and it never has. It does not fail at link time or on a missing system library — it fails before cargo resolves a single crate:

error: failed to load manifest for workspace member `…/dwarves/crates/dwarves`
Caused by: failed to load manifest for dependency `autonom`
Caused by: failed to read `…/edda/crates/autonom/Cargo.toml`
Caused by: No such file or directory (os error 2)

Measured on a fresh clone of main 6052d02 (2026-08-07) into an empty directory.

That is not a bug in the clone. dwarves is one repo of a constellation that is wired with path dependencies to its siblings, and path deps are not optional: cargo reads every one of them to build the dependency graph. A path that is not there is a hard error, so the siblings are a build dependency exactly like a crate is — they are just not something cargo can fetch for you.

There is no --offline, no feature flag and no [patch] trick that avoids this. The only fix is to have the siblings on disk, side by side.

The layout — this is the whole secret

Every path is relative (../edda/..., ../facett/...), so the repos must be siblings in ONE parent directory. The parent's name does not matter; dwarves must not be nested inside another repo.

<parent>/
├── dwarves/          ← the one you actually wanted
├── edda/             ← 53 path deps point here (the most load-bearing sibling)
├── facett/           ← 37 path deps (the UI framework)
├── nornir/
├── holger/
├── modgunn/          ← TRANSITIVE: nothing in dwarves names it; holger-server-lib does
├── znippy/
├── znippy-zoomies/
├── skade/
├── draupnir/
├── Skidbladnir/      ← capital S, and the directory name must match
├── tunnr/
└── funnel-core/

Twelve repos, dwarves included. Verified sufficient: with exactly these, cargo metadata on a fresh main clone exits 0. Verified necessary the honest way — by adding them one at a time and re-reading the error, which is how modgunn was found.

Do it

mkdir -p ~/git && cd ~/git

git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/dwarves.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/edda.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/facett.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/nornir.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/holger.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/modgunn.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/znippy.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/znippy-zoomies.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/skade.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/draupnir.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/Skidbladnir.git
git clone git@codeberg.org:nordisk/funnel-core.git

# ⚠ tunnr is NOT under nordisk. It is mikronova, and it is an ssh:// URL.
git clone ssh://git@codeberg.org/mikronova/tunnr.git

Then check the wiring BEFORE starting a long build, because this is the step that tells you a sibling is missing in one second instead of twenty minutes:

cd dwarves && cargo metadata --format-version 1 >/dev/null && echo "constellation OK"

warning: patch … was not used in the crate graph on that command is normal — the [patch.crates-io] block in dwarves/Cargo.toml covers the fat/holger build, and a default build does not resolve all of it. Warnings are not the verdict; the exit code is.

Two traps that are not about dwarves

• Do not clone every sibling at a tag or a pinned SHA. These repos move together, and the path deps mean you compile whatever is checked out — not what Cargo.lock says. Clone the default branch and leave it alone.
• The canonical branch is not main everywhere. znippy's is master. git clone gets this right on its own (it follows origin/HEAD); a script that hard-codes -b main gets it wrong. If you need to know, ask the repo, never a document: git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD.

Then build

cargo build is not the entry point either — what gets built comes from .nornir/build-variants.toml, so the declaration cannot drift from the build:

cargo xtask build --suite ORIGINAL --list          # the five declared variants
cargo xtask build --suite ORIGINAL --variant dwarves-ui

(--atom is the deprecated spelling of --variant; it still works.)

The five variants are dwarves-server (the service), dwarves (the fat CLI), dwarves-cli (the thin CLI), dwarves-ui (the thin desktop UI) and dwarves-solo (the UI with the server compiled in). Pick the one you want; dwarves-ui is the desktop app.

Disk: the fat dwarves-server artifact alone is ~300 MB and the shared target/ for the whole constellation runs to tens of GB. On a laptop, point CARGO_TARGET_DIR at a disk that can take it.

Robot UI tests are WAYLAND ONLY

Do not reach for Xvfb, and do not set DISPLAY. The robot-UI drive supports Wayland and nothing else — see dwarves-gui/src/robot_mode.rs and the nornir-robotui display backend. On a Wayland session the visible replay is:

cargo xtask build --suite ORIGINAL --variant dwarves-ui
dwarves-ui --robot-mode headless    # off-screen, no window, exits non-zero on a red step
dwarves-ui --robot-mode watch       # a real window, replays the recorded tab tour

--robot-mode headless needs --features robot-remote; watch needs --features watch. A binary built without them refuses the flag and exits 2 rather than opening a plain GUI window that drives nothing.