= Porting Tips =

== Documentation ==

Some documentation:

 * A short but very helpful [http://revolf.free.fr/beos/BeGeistert-13/Porting%20Apps%20to%20BeOS.pdf slideset] on porting applications to BeOS by François Revol (mmu_man).
 * A comprehensive [http://www-src.lip6.fr/homepages/Alexandre.Duret-Lutz/autotools.html tutorial] on the GNU Autotools

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



== Getting started on Haiku OS ==

=== 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, [wiki:dev-lang/perl 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 [http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/1844 shell script] to aid in this is available for use with autotools based software.


== Porting considerations ==

To automatically patch software with the BePorter tool, source tarballs should be diff'ed (cf. CreatePatch).

Most projects however use SCM/VCS software including CVS, Subversion, git and Mercurial and accept patches only against their latest (HEAD) development version. A possible strategy is:

 1. Download and try the latest released source tarball. If it works, no further steps are necessary.
 1. Otherwise, check if the project maintains a publicly accessible (anonymous) source code repository. You might be able to choose between a branch corresponding to the version number of the source tarball or trunk. (Terminology varies between the VCS tools.)

Doing so, you can easily track or revert your own changes, and this is the preferred format for submitting patches to the respective projects.

Note that it is not easily automatable for BePorter though, but once accepted, future source tarballs promise to compile without patching.

Also note that doing so may, depending on the project, result in more dependencies but might be easier to handle, for instance when modifying {{{configure.in}}} or {{{Makefile.am}}} instead of an Autoconf-generated {{{configure}}} or Automake-generated {{{Makefile}}}.