Haiku and Mono
One of my many side tinkerings has been porting Mono to different platforms. I've ported Mono successfully to WebOS 2.0 (which was instantly broke when 3.0 came out, and I have not looked into it further). I've also been looking at porting it to the Playbook OS. One of the platforms that I attempted and failed was Haiku.
The failure was a combination of things. It was about 2-3 years ago, and Mono had some glib dependencies that were an issue, as well as libgdiplus. And then on the haiku side, libiconv, pthreads and POSIX signal.h wasnt available. I used this wiki entry to help guide me.
I actually successfully compiled mono on haiku 2 years ago, after some header file hacks, some edits on the mono side, etc. I deemed it way way too neutered to do move forward, and dropped the project. Back around July 2011 alpha 3 was released (i was doing my initial stuff on alpha 2), and after checking the Haiku Porting guide I figured, "why not try?", so I spun up a Haiku alpha 3 VM. Amazingly libiconv and pthreads were fixed, and mono now had a working embedded glib option. I still ran into the signal.h wall. I decided not to add my header hacks, since I know very little about signal handling from the kernel side, and wasnt prepared to push for kernel changes in haiku. Looking back, it may have been useful to catalog my tinkerings for the masses, but oh well.
Fast forward to a few days ago, I noticed this wiki entry and specifically I noticed the bug entry for "Support for realtime signals is missing" had the numbers crossed out. Come to find out, after a little bit more digging, that ticket was fixed. The signal issue was no more, but it was a few months after the alpha 3 release! On a quick side note, the haiku project has this excellent source control/build system. they have nightly builds that get packaged up as anyboot/ISO/tar.gz deployments. This allows any developer to instantly test code without hunting down instructions on how to build an ISO or USB boot device. Developers on Haiku can focus on whats important, the code.
Anyway, I quickly downloaded the latest nightly, which includes the signal fixes, and had it up and running in 30 mins. I am now poking around, once again, to see if i can get mono to compile....this time without any haiku changes. I would like to be able to create a patch for the community.
The failure was a combination of things. It was about 2-3 years ago, and Mono had some glib dependencies that were an issue, as well as libgdiplus. And then on the haiku side, libiconv, pthreads and POSIX signal.h wasnt available. I used this wiki entry to help guide me.
I actually successfully compiled mono on haiku 2 years ago, after some header file hacks, some edits on the mono side, etc. I deemed it way way too neutered to do move forward, and dropped the project. Back around July 2011 alpha 3 was released (i was doing my initial stuff on alpha 2), and after checking the Haiku Porting guide I figured, "why not try?", so I spun up a Haiku alpha 3 VM. Amazingly libiconv and pthreads were fixed, and mono now had a working embedded glib option. I still ran into the signal.h wall. I decided not to add my header hacks, since I know very little about signal handling from the kernel side, and wasnt prepared to push for kernel changes in haiku. Looking back, it may have been useful to catalog my tinkerings for the masses, but oh well.
Fast forward to a few days ago, I noticed this wiki entry and specifically I noticed the bug entry for "Support for realtime signals is missing" had the numbers crossed out. Come to find out, after a little bit more digging, that ticket was fixed. The signal issue was no more, but it was a few months after the alpha 3 release! On a quick side note, the haiku project has this excellent source control/build system. they have nightly builds that get packaged up as anyboot/ISO/tar.gz deployments. This allows any developer to instantly test code without hunting down instructions on how to build an ISO or USB boot device. Developers on Haiku can focus on whats important, the code.
Anyway, I quickly downloaded the latest nightly, which includes the signal fixes, and had it up and running in 30 mins. I am now poking around, once again, to see if i can get mono to compile....this time without any haiku changes. I would like to be able to create a patch for the community.
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