Missing dependencies in setup_host.sh / Missing instructions for building

[cweickhmann]

• PYNQ version: current commit #e5d0c03 (corresponds to v3.0.x)
• Board name (e.g. Pynq-Z2): Does not matter, not a board issue
• Description:

I've followed the instructions to build PYNQ using pre-built binaries. As described, I created a Ubuntu 20.04 VM and installed Vivado/Vitis 2022.1 (the corresponding version for PYNQ 3.0.x).

When preparing to build PYNQ, a few instructions and package dependencies are missing in docs and scripts. Namely:

• sdbuild/scripts/setup_host.sh: Should have zlib1g, ncurses-dev and libtinfo5 included in PACKAGES (line 31 following). Otherwise make will fail for any board.
• Not having en_US.UTF-8 in the machine's locale causes an error being thrown. A quick'n'dirty fix for this would be to add the instruction to
  • add en_US.UTF-8 to /etc/locale.gen and
  • run locale-gen
  • A better fix would be to inform the developer on how to set their custom locale.

(There's one more thing that would make one's life much easier - out of scope of this report, but it has to be said: please think about a proper way of reporting device tree compile errors. Just dumping a bunch of Python error messages is confusing at best.)