build

To work on the Haiku WebKit port one needs to take some time to get the right environment set up. At the moment the Haiku WebKit port can only be developed on Linux and cross compiled with the GCC4 compiler. So the first step is to follow my tutorial on building Haiku on Ubuntu. On step 5 of the above, please be sure to build the GCC4 cross compiler, not the GCC2 version. If you have already built Haiku with GCC2 on Linux, I recommend renaming your current "generated" directory in the Haiku tree to "generated_gcc2" and then continue with step 5 from the above, setting up the GCC4 cross compiler. Switching between compilers can then be done by just renaming the generated directory, since it contains all compiled build tools and necessary files for each compiler.

Another article on this site already describes the basics of building Haiku on Linux. Since my distribution of choice is Ubuntu, I decided to get Haiku building on it and then provide a detailed step-by-step guide for others to follow.

I performed these steps on a fresh Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) install, but they should be similar for other versions and probably the same for most Debian-based distributions.

Part 1

Before the musicians in the audience get too excited, I'm not going to talk about getting together with buddies to crank out some tunes. Nor will the cooks in the audience find instructions on making the perfect fruit preserves. No, when I say Jamming, I refer to the act of using the Jam build tool.

In this first part of my series on the Jam build tool, I'm going to provide a high level overview as well as show the product of some of my recent labors with Jam: the Jamfile-engine. For those who have developed on BeOS for a decent amount of time, this may sound familiar. It should, because I have essentially taken the functionality of the Be makefile-engine and "ported" it to Jam.