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Llama

Banned

From: St.-Petersburg, Russia

Registered: 2008-03-03

Posts: 1,379

Application building primer

Hi,

I tried to find a manual on building real world applications for Linux, without much success. I mean, how to go about building applications from somebody else's sources? Of course, there's usually a developer's step-by-step guide, but the lack of general understanding is really frustrating...

Any links/suggestions? I mean, technology outside ABS.

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: Application building primer

Typically, open source C and C++ apps, as well as several others use autoconf; look for tutorials on that suite of tools. Look for some tutorials on that.

Also, take a look at the build() function of any PKGBUILD. This is the shell commands to build that package. You could run them on your shell, one by one, and the program would be compiled and installed (but pacman wouldn't know about it, so that sucks). Read the man page of each command you come across. Some important ones are gcc, g++ (compilers) and make (which is a way to instruct what compiler to run and how). ./configure is a script generated by autoconf, mentioned above.

Dusty

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