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This is the guide on using the Owl build environment. It is assumed that you've read the CONCEPTS; if not, please do so before you proceed with this document.

/usr/src/world setup.

The build environment is pre-configured for the use of /usr/src/world (the HOME= setting in buildworld.conf and installworld.conf). It is recommended that you leave this default setting and either actually place the files in /usr/src/world or use a symlink if /usr/src is not on a suitable device (see below for the requirements).

When building natively (that is, on Owl), the directory is already there. Otherwise, you need to create the directory, add pseudo-user "build", preferably with UID 151 and GID 150 ("sources"), and make it the owner of the directory.

Place the CVS tree into /usr/src/world. The easiest way to do it is by extracting native.tar.gz available via the FTP mirrors. You will get the "native" directory, and a Makefile symlink.

For actually building from source, place the "sources" directory in /usr/src/world as well.

If you are not on an Owl system, yet, and want to install binary packages, create /usr/src/world/RPMS and place the packages for your architecture in there. Note that you need the CVS tree even for installing binary packages.

Requirements.

To (re-)build Owl from source, you'll need:

at least 1 GB free disk space under /usr/src/world for use during the builds;

at least 1 GB of virtual memory (RAM + swap, or OpenVZ privvmpages);

a few hours of CPU time, on a modern system (on a multi-core system, the total build time will be less than the CPU time - likely under an hour).

And, of course, you should be running the build on Owl. Building on another GNU/*/Linux system is sometimes possible, but tricky and requires that you slowly produce an Owl system with multiple iterations of "make buildworld" and "make installworld".

Here are some build times (hours:minutes) for Owl 3.0, so that you know what to expect:

Core 2 Duo E6550, 2.33 GHz, 2 GB				0:55

These are for the default set of tests ("RUN_TESTS=" in buildworld.conf commented out, missing, or set to an empty string). The build times happen to be about the same for i686 and x86_64 builds (when the machine supports both).

Some build times of Owl 2.0 (Owl 3.0 and Owl-current should take a bit longer and some packages will likely fail to build since we haven't been doing builds for these architectures for a long time):

UltraSparc IIi, 400 MHz, 256 MB					10:00
Alpha 21164PC (164SX-1MB), 533 MHz, 128 MB			14:00

(Yes, gcc is this hungry and slow on Alpha.)

The build times will increase as we add more packages and update to new versions of software already in Owl.

Native (re-)builds.

As user "build", change directory to /usr/src/world and type:

	make clean && make buildworld

With the default buildworld.conf, packages will be built for a certain flavor of the build host's architecture (see ARCHITECTURES) and the build will attempt to use all system processors.

buildworld.conf (as well as other *.conf's) may be edited by copying it from native/Owl/build into /usr/src/world. You need to remove the symlink first, if one has previously been created for you.

All packages are built with whatever versions of libraries and build tools are installed on the system. Multiple iterations of buildworld and installworld (two are sufficient most of the time) should be used when there have been significant updates to packages used during the builds.

Installing binary packages.

"make installworld" will install packages found in /usr/src/world/RPMS onto the current system, or in a new root directory of your choice (as specified by the ROOT= setting in installworld.conf). By default, the packages will be installed into /owl.

"make installworld" should be run as root.

(Re-)building individual packages.

Individual packages may be built or re-built with "make PACKAGE=name", where "name" is the name of the source package. For foreign packages (SRPMs) built with the Owl build environment you also need to include the version number part in "name".

$Owl: Owl/doc/BUILD,v 1.46 2011/10/24 09:06:48 solar Exp $