Porting Tips

Documentation

Some documentation:

• A short but very helpful  slideset on porting applications to BeOS by François Revol (mmu_man).
• A comprehensive  tutorial on the GNU Autotools

The CommonProblems page lists a number of common problems encountered when porting applications to BeOS.

Haiku OS tips

gcc 2.x (default)

When building your own Haiku image, you can add

AddOptionalHaikuImagePackages Development ;

to your build/jam/UserBuildConfig file. This sets up a development environment and unzips a small tree of ready-to-use binary tools onto your image, including a Haiku-specific gcc2, Perl and autotools. Other helpful packages are OpenSSL and the Pe text editor (which allows you to jump to the line of an error message).

Most software cannot handle i586-pc-haiku yet, so it is usually necessary to configure with --build=i586-pc-beos.

gcc 4.x

A native development environment is not yet available for gcc4-based Haiku; the cross-compiler can be used instead.

A  shell script to aid in this is available for use with autotools based software.