Safeguarding the past, present and future of RISC OS for everyone

Build FAQ (Rev #6)

Here are some very quick questions answered regarding the RISC OS build process:

General questions

What are all these "Duplicate component" errors when I build using !Builder?

Some directories are failing to be created during the build process. What’s going on?

Why am I having problems with perl scripts in the build process?

A component doesn’t seem to build because there are some header files missing…

What other relevant documentation should I read?

I have another question…

What are all these “Duplicate component” errors when I build using `!Builder`?

All of those ‘errors’ are actually nothing of the sort. This dates back to the days when scrbuild (the binary which is hiding behind !Builder) was only used for ROM builds and they considered having the same module in a build multiple times to be an error.

For other builds, such as disc builds, this is no longer the case; you often want to have multiple builds of a given component. We just haven’t got around to clobbering scrbuild yet.

^ Top

Some directories are failing to be created during the build process. What’s going on?

This is usually because mkdir isn’t working correctly. We have a tool called mkdir in the RiscOS.Library.UNIX directory which is a simple port of the UNIX mkdir command, including the ”-p” switch which means create parent directories if they also don’t exist.

Some people already have a utility called mkdir installed on their system that doesn’t implement the -p switch, or they have an alias for mkdir which simply calls cdir, both of which stops our one from being run.

Check for the alias being set or another version of mkdir being present on your machine (e.g. in !Boot.Library).

^ Top

Why am I having problems with perl scripts in the build process?

This can often be because the version of perl installed on your machine is different (often much newer) than the one supplied in the RISC OS BBE.

Many of the perl scripts in the build process only work well with that particular version. You should unset all perl-related system variables and run RiscOS.Apps.!perl manually to ensure that the correct version of perl is available to the build process.

If anyone out there wants to update our perl scripts to work on a current port of perl, they should get in touch with us at info@riscosopen.org.

^ Top

A component doesn’t seem to build because there are some header files missing…

The RISC OS build environment has a directory called RiscOS.Export which is a shared location into which components export header files and library binaries.

You should try to ensure that this directory is fully populated before you start working on a component. Load the RiscOS.Apps.!Builder application and run the “export headers” and “export libraries” phases on a “ROOL.BatchOne” and “ROOL.BatchTwo” build.

If you look in various Makefiles within a component’s sources, you will notice phases called export_hdrs and export_libs which perform this export operation.

Finally, it’s possible that the problem component simply cannot build because it depends upon another component which we’ve not released yet. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to release components in the order of dependencies so this will be a problem from time to time.