devkitPro

For a while, I was having trouble following the tutorial to install devkitPPC on Unix-like platforms because it wasn't working as expected on my system (WSL 1). That tutorial directed me to this page which is where I seemed to encounter an issue. After a bit, luckycharms14 gave me the steps below which got it working perfectly.

Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what I was having trouble with initially and don't know how to go back and test it again, but to get devkitPPC working in WSL 1, here are the exact steps I took (as provided by luckycharms14 in the MeleeModdingLibrary Discord):
I think the parts that I didn't know to do and should be noted in the wiki article were lines 3 and 4 (-Sy instead of -Syu). Forgive me if these steps should be obvious, but for someone without any experience with Arch Linux pacman and only the very basics of Unix-like platforms, I think these are important steps to include so that anyone can get into using devkitPPC.

I've added changes to wiki/devkitPro_pacman and also https://github.com/devkitPro/installer/releases/latest to help make this clearer.

We don't advise adding devkitPPC to the PATH permanently via .bashrc or any other method though. The standard Makefile based templates we use add the needed paths when building instead of relying on the tools being in the PATH. This prevents potentially interfering with other powerpc-eabi toolchains and also ensures that the correct tools are used. It may not matter too much for you specifically right now but it has in the past for others & may trip you up in the future.

Is there a particular reason you're using the linux binaries on WSL rather than the native windows binaries?

Great! And thanks for the warning about adding devkitPPC to the PATH. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Yeah, I actually had a problem getting the native windows binaries to work. I tried following the Windows instructions initially by downloading the Windows graphical installer from github and running it. The next step on the Getting Started wiki page was to launch MSYS from the devkitPro folder in the start menu. However, in that start folder, there wasn't anything called MSYS. The closest thing I could find was a dead shortcut called msys2. I checked the file location and saw that most of the folders in the devkitPro folder were empty, so that it looked like almost nothing of substance was there except the folder structure. That's when I decided to see if I could get the Unix instructions to work in WSL instead. I'm still not sure what I did incorrectly, and since I was able to get it working in WSL, I haven't tried again to install it using the graphical installer.

Did you by any chance have a previous msys2 installation or something that includes it's own msys2 bundle?

It's really quite difficult to debug these things after the fact unfortunately. It would have been much better had luckycharms14 sent you to us for support rather than helping you sidestep the problem. We can't fix things if we don't know they're broken and it is a source of continual frustration that nobody is ever sent to us until long after workarounds have been applied that may or may not have exacerbated the problem.

Sorry about that! All of the devkitPro forums and wikis were down when I learned of dkp and I didn't know they would be coming back. So for a while, I was working off of archived copies of the wiki from the wayback machine, and the MeleeModdingLibrary Discord was the only relevant community that I knew how to find. Next time, I'll try to find a way to let you know first.

I thought maybe the missing files had something to do with the websites being down. And about having a previous msys2 installation, I don't know of anything that would have required that, so I think it's unlikely unless something added it without me knowing.