[haiku] Re: Developing for Haiku

  • From: Humdinger <humdingerb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:09:15 +0200

Hi Damien,

great you're interested in developing software for Haiku. All developers seem to be in a bit of stress due to the upcoming alpha release. Until a Haiku programmer can offer some advice, take this from a non-programmer. :)

Damien Gerard wrote:
This library is mostly dedicated to 3D applications but it has several modules. The library is not mature yet but a few project already use it.
The minimal requirements are >=g++3.4.x, cmake 2.6.4, svn.

There is gcc-4.3.3, cmake and svn, see 
http://ports.haiku-files.org/wiki/dev-util

IIRC, the alpha will come as gcc2 (+gcc4 library) hybrid, so I guess only a gcc2 will be included? So, if you don't build Haiku yourself, you'll need to install gcc4 separately.
Others will hopefully provide details here or correct me if I'm wrong.

As I am new to this OS, I would like to ask you :
- Is this documentation ["Programming the Be Operating System"]
> sufficient and appropriate for my purposes ?

This book is pretty dated and at a few places not totally correct as I've heard. It may serve as a nice introduction to the BeOS/Haiku philosophy, but deals mostly with GUI apps, IIRC. I guess most useful would be the BeBook (http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/), the quite incomplete HaikuBook (http://factory.haiku-os.org/documentation/Haiku_Book_doxygen/html/) and looking through the source of the software that comes with Haiku (http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/). You may also want to have a look at HaikuPorts (http://ports.haiku-files.org/blog) and join their mailing list.

- Do I have to recompile by myself all the needed packages (especially for gcc) or there is a package manager that I should use ?

There are OptionalPackage (http://haiku-files.org/files/optional-packages/) you can include when building your own image, plus - I guess most what you need(?) - should be included in the alpha image by default with the "Development" package. Installing those into an installed system should work, I don't know however, if e.g. gcc4 needs some special setup.

- Has haiku a minimal support for OpenGL ? (it seems that a libGL.so is available according to the 'locate' command)

Haiku has software OpenGL via MESA. Artur Wyszynski (aljen) is working on 
porting Gallium3d.

I hope this helps you a bit and others who are more knowledgeable in these matters will chime in.

Once you're all set, you can pose your questions to the 3rd party dev mailing list (//www.freelists.org/list/haiku-3rdparty-dev) which is for discussions of developing software _for_ Haiku rather than Haiku itself.

Welcome to Haiku!

Regards,
Humdinger

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