Adafruit Neopixel Git Submodule Not Loading

[Mikefly123]

Description of the Issue

On the ngay-led branch when you try to do a fprime-util generate rpipico && fprime-util build rpipico -j20 it fails with the following error:

  CMake Error at lib/CMakeLists.txt:14 (add_library):

    Cannot find source file:

      /Users/ncc-michael/GitHut/fprime-proves/lib/Adafruit_NeoPixel/Adafruit_NeoPixel.cpp

This appears to be because the Adafruit_NeoPixel submodule is not loading correctly.

When git submodule update --init --recursive is run the following error is thrown:

fatal: not a git repository: /Users/ncc-michael/GitHut/fprime-proves/lib/Adafruit_NeoPixel/../../.git/modules/lib/Adafruit_NeoPixel
Failed to clone 'lib/Adafruit_NeoPixel'. Retry scheduled
BUG: submodule considered for cloning, doesn't need cloning any more?
fatal: could not get a repository handle for submodule 'lib/Adafruit_NeoPixel'

This error also blocks cloning the ngay-led branch on GitHub Desktop. I think this is an issue with the Adafruit Repo, so not sure what we can do to fix it.

Solution

I got around this by doing the following in the lib folder:

rm -rf Adafruit_NeoPixel
git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_NeoPixel.git

We might want to consider adding this note to the README.

[nateinaction]

I'm not sure this is a bug but rather just us not knowing how to interact with git submodules. It's not a feature I use often either. I'll work on some docs for folks who need to update any third party packages we pull in. I suspect existing docs will work for people who are cloning the repo for the first time but I can give that a try as well.