This is some early thoughts on the process of building LIBC and the other tools in the LIBC repository. People with better english skills and first hand experience in doing this stuff from scratch are welcome to help filling in the gaps.

Select Source Tree

Before even checking out the sources, you have to decide which sources to get. There are the following options:

• The trunk - development branch. url: ​http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/libc/trunk/
  Choose this if you are interested in helping out with/on new features and make the new world a better place.
• The libc-0.6 branch - release branch. url: ​http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/libc/branches/libc-0.6/
  Choose this if you are out for bugfixing in or backporting bugfixes to in this release, of if you are simply hunrgy from something to build.
  This is also the right choice if you want something which is 100% sure to be usable.
• The libc-0.5 branch - old release branch. url: ​http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/libc/branches/GCC_3-2-2_BETA4_BRANCH/
  Choose this if you have critical bugs which needs fixing in the 0.5 release. Only critical fixes are accepted.

Checking Out The Tree

todo

Setting Up The Build Environment

This is gonna be difficult to explain. esp. since I'm using a clash together mixup here...

Required Tools

1. Latest GCC release. Check ​ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/gcc/
   N.B. For building the 0.5 branch you should probably use the latest 3.2.2 release from ​http://www.innotek.de/products/gccos2/download/gccos2download_e.html

1. Latest GNU Make 3.81 beta. Check the unixos2. TODO: Build this with libc-0.6 and find somewhere to put the build.
2. ....

Doing The Build

The instructions here is somewhat different between the trunk and the branches. Things has moved around and some even split up after libc-0.6 was branched.

Building The Trunk

You have two choices, build everything or just a single component. When building single components you go into the root directory for that component. For libc that means /libc. libc and emx are currently in an intermediate shape buildsystem wise, and you'll have to specify the makefile on the make commandline: make -f Makefile.gmk This will print a menu of the make goals. The all and install goals are choices you can't go wrong with.

Building gcc and binutils means using the GNU buildsystem. Explain about the GNU buildsystem, blah blah blah.

About Releasing

It is not permitted for anyone other than the release engineer (i.e. bird) to publish libc builds using the natural series of dll names, since this will cause confusion among users and incompatibility between the official releases and your releases. Not complying with this simple rule is a sure way of pissing people of, at least bird.

The natural series is expressed by this regexp '/^{libc[0-9][0-9][0-9]*[abr]*[0-9]*\.dll$/'. Examples: libc05.dll, libc06.dll, libc06a1.dll, libc06b4.dll, libc06r2.dll, libc07r1.dll, libc10.dll, and libc100a.dll}