jam

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:

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.

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.