Getting Started

This document outlines the team structure of the Documentation Team. It will describe how the privileges and duties are distributed between the three main entities: Contributors, Members and the Coordinator. It will also describe how the advancement system works.

This document is supposed to give you some insight where you'll find what in the source repository tree. If you're familiar with Haiku already, you will notice that the tree layout to some degree mirrors the structure a Haiku installation has on disk.

Things that are built are usually put under "src", for example, there is a "data", and a "src/data" folder - the former for example contains scripts or settings ready to be copied to the Haiku image, while the latter for example contains the MIME types database that first have to be converted from a format that is easy to edit to what Haiku expects.

Haiku R1 (x86) was designed and is being implemented to be binary and source compatible with applications written for BeOS R5 (x86) to a large extent, but not the other way around. In some cases we deliberately broke source compatibility while at the same time maintaining binary compatibility. Here are some specific examples:

Please note this document mainly pertains to building Haiku under BeOS R5 and later.

Getting the source

All commands must be executed in the Terminal.

Go to the parent directory for Haiku's repository and enter:

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/haiku/haiku/trunk haiku

This will checkout the source into a new subdirectory called "haiku". Members of Haiku should login with their BerliOS account to get commit access:

The information on this page is intended to explain how you can get started with Haiku development.

Getting Involved

The best way to get into developing on the Haiku project is to get to know the environment and make yourself familiar with the system. If you have programmed for BeOS before, getting into the Haiku API shouldn't be a problem. If you are new to Haiku and BeOS, try spending some time with easier tasks (see below). It is much easier for us to help you with problems you encounter after you chose a task than to assign one to you as we don't know what your exact skills and preferences are.

This document is not complete. If a guideline for a particular format is missing, follow the style of existing code (prefer using Haiku sources as a reference for this). If you have suggestions for things that should be clarified better, etc. please let us know. Please don't send us suggestions of the kind "I like this indenting style better, could we switch?".

Some code doesn't match our guidelines in some places, due mainly to time constraints. Help with cleaning up the code is very welcome.

Rather than advocating a given coding style, the main goal here is code consistency - after a stream of external contributions and patches we would like the Haiku code base to remain clean, uniform, easy to read and maintain.

What you need

You will need svn before starting this process; the other tools (jam, gcc et al) are built from our repository. Before attempting to build Haiku, one must get copies of the development toolchain. Keep in mind that the process will consume around 1 GiB of disk space.