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Common Porting Problems

This page serves to collect information about common problems encountered when porting applications/libraries to the Haiku/BeOS platform. The problems should be identified by the (compiler) errors that typify them.

Information about BeOS's POSIX compatibility, see BeOSPosix.

Main UNIX differences

No /usr: Just like BeOS, Haiku does not have /usr. Attempts to install things to /usr will usually fail and leave empty folders, because rootfs only allows creating directories, not regular files. The proper fix is to use --prefix=/boot/common in ./configure command for libraries and --prefix=/boot/apps/yourapphere for applications.

No -lm was encountered: The -lm refers to libm which isn't needed for Haiku or BeOS. As the math library is part of libroot, is linked by default, implicitly. If the port is using the autotools chances are this can be fixed by doing an AC_CHECK_LIB for cos in m and then setting a variable such as LIBM or MLIB to by ="-lm" if true or ="" if not. Here is some explanation: http://www.freelists.org/archives/haiku-development/04-2008/msg00904.html

No -lc was encountered: This sometimes turns up, and I think it is due to the port using an older libtool. Try running libtoolize --force --copy --install, aclocal, autoconf and automake before ./configure to see if that clears it up.

No glXGetProcAddressARB: use glutGetProcAddress(const char* procName) instead. See Haiku r38579.

No socket or connection function was encountered: The socket and connection functionalities are provided in Haiku's libnetwork. The proper fix for this is to patch the configure file to check that library as well. This is an example patch of libevent:

diff -Naur libevent-1.4.13-stable/configure.in libevent-1.4.13-stable-haiku/configure.in
--- libevent-1.4.13-stable/configure.in	2009-05-24 13:37:49.000000000 +0000
+++ libevent-1.4.13-stable-haiku/configure.in	2009-05-28 16:55:17.000000000 +0000
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
 AC_SUBST(LIBTOOL_DEPS)

 dnl Checks for libraries.
-AC_CHECK_LIB(socket, socket)
+AC_SEARCH_LIBS(socket, socket network)
 AC_CHECK_LIB(resolv, inet_aton)
 AC_CHECK_LIB(rt, clock_gettime)
 AC_CHECK_LIB(nsl, inet_ntoa)

Also note BeOS (BONE) needs libsocket and libbind instead.

Also, both libbind (on BeOS) and libnetwork (on Haiku) have some usual symbols mangled with a prepended underscore (or 2), so typically a test for inet_aton like above changed to AC_SEARCH_LIBS(inet_aton, resolv bind) will fail to find libbind (which exports it as __inet_aton).

This is because headers use preprocessor defines to make inet_aton() available, and the linking checks done by autoconf does not include the proper headers. This can be fixed by checking for another (unmangled) symbol like gethostbyname2. The cleanest checks for the above patch would then be:

diff -Naur libevent-1.4.13-stable/configure.in libevent-1.4.13-stable-haiku/configure.in
--- libevent-1.4.13-stable/configure.in	2009-05-24 13:37:49.000000000 +0000
+++ libevent-1.4.13-stable-haiku/configure.in	2009-05-28 16:55:17.000000000 +0000
@@ -33,7 +33,6 @@
 AC_SUBST(LIBTOOL_DEPS)

 dnl Checks for libraries.
-AC_CHECK_LIB(socket, socket)
+AC_SEARCH_LIBS(socket, socket network)
-AC_CHECK_LIB(resolv, inet_aton)
+AC_SEARCH_LIBS(gethostbyname2, bind nsl resolv)
 AC_CHECK_LIB(rt, clock_gettime)
-AC_CHECK_LIB(nsl, inet_ntoa)

You will want to contact the project to ask for guidance here though, as it might impact other platforms. Also don't forget to fix the use of the HAVE_FOO macros in the code.

Actually, it seems Haiku provides inet_ntoa() as a weak alias for __inet_ntoa, (plus libnetwork is also checked for for socket(), though some applications won't use the tested symbols if the tested libraries are not there... which is why AC_SEARCH_LIBS is better than AC_CHECK_LIBS, as it first checks if the symbol is available already).

Missing functions

MSG_NOSIGNAL undeclared: Add the following code into header/source file.
```
#ifndef MSG_NOSIGNAL 
#define MSG_NOSIGNAL 0 
#endif
```

IFF_RUNNING undeclared: Add the following code into header/source file.
```
#ifndef IFF_RUNNING
#define IFF_RUNNING 0x0001 
#endif
```

FNDELAY undeclared: Add the following code into header/source file.
```
#ifndef FNDELAY
#define FNDELAY O_NONBLOCK 
#endif
```

O_NOATIME undeclared: Add the following code into header/source file.

#include <fcntl.h>
#ifndef _GNU_SOURCE
#define _GNU_SOURCE // for O_NOATIME
#define O_NOATIME 01000000
#endif

d_namlen undeclared: Add the following code into header/source file.

#include <dirent.h>
#ifndef d_namlen
#define d_namlen d_reclen
#endif

DT_DIR undeclared: The use of DT_DIR doesn't work on non-ext* filesystems. So replace for

#ifndef DT_DIR
/* dirent.d_type is a BSD extension, not part of POSIX */
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <string.h>

static int
is_dir (const char *path, const char *name)
{
  int len1 = strlen(path);
  int len2 = strlen(name);

  char pathname[len1 + 1 + len2 + 1 + 13];
  strcpy (pathname, path);

  /* Avoid UNC-path "//name" on Cygwin.  */
  if (len1 > 0 && pathname[len1 - 1] != '/')
    strcat (pathname, "/");

  strcat (pathname, name);

  struct stat st;
  if (stat (pathname, &st))
    return 0;
  return S_ISDIR (st.st_mode);
}
#endif

//And after, add a check function
info.dir = !! is_dir (path, de->d_name);

Compile time problems

No undefined references allowed in i586-pc-beos shared libraries: found in dev-util/subversion and dev-libs/apr ports. You need to pass the -no-undefined option to libtool. Alternatively, libtool can be patched to always exhibit this behavior, "at the risk of breaking static compilation when dynamic linking fails". -- andreasf

GCC 2 build problems

output_operand_lossage `invalid expression as operand': This can be avoided by not passing the -g option to gcc for this test.

GCC 4 build problems

Typical errors look like these:

error: 'find' is not a member of 'std'

error: 'exit' was not declared in this scope

Please take a look at: http://www.cyrius.com/journal/2007/05/10#gcc-4.3-include and http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/hannah/cpp/errors.html

Haiku fixed problems

(stat) structure has no member 'st_blocks': found in app-arch/tar (make check), net-fs/samba? and dev-util/cvs ports. The stat struct in sys/stat.h in BeOS and Haiku ( http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/2261 Haiku now has it, http://dev.haiku-os.org/changeset/27791 as seen here) doesn't have an st_blocks member. In projects with autoconf, you can check for HAVE_STAT_ST_BLOCKS. Please check http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2005-January/039275.html for more information.

stdbool.in.h: http://ports.haiku-files.org/wiki/dev-libs/gnulib. So any releases posted AFTER May 25, 2008 'should' include an updated stdbool.in.h

iconv: Iconv is included in Haiku, but many times ./configure does not detect and use it. This is because it is in libtextencoding.so ( should be fixed now). So try adding a check for iconv in -ltextencoding and see if that works.

Conflicting types for 'restrict':

/boot/develop/headers/posix/search.h:35: conflicting types for `restrict'
/boot/develop/headers/posix/search.h:35: previous declaration of `restrict'

This seems to be an issue with Haiku and has been reported Haiku-2262. This has been fixed in Haiku. If using a version prior to the fix you can copy the search.h file over the one in your headers/posix folder.

Missing syslog(): On BeOS, syslog() is in libbe, so one must AC_SEARCH_LIBS(syslog, be). It's in libroot on Haiku so it shouldn't need any check.

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