CUPS requirements so far...

So far I have found the following requirements for the various parts of CUPS:

Perl 5.8.0
file 3.31
automake 1.8
autoconf 2.58
libm 5.4
libxml 2.6.2

Now:
perl 5.8.0 exists.
file 3.31 seems to be ported with no problems.
autoconf 2.58 I had to do a dirty port as BeOS R5 doesn't support flock
automake 1.8 can be ported after autoconf 2.58 (done)
libm 5.4 needs to be ported. I haven't yet managed to create the static library, however using trig.h PI definitions from Haiku makes it compile. Any help?
libxml 2.6.2 was a surprise as it seems to be ported with no problems. At the time of this post my dev system is running the libxml tests.

Update: Found out that ginstall is also needed. No time to check on that now. Be back tomorrow.

Now this IS cross platform!

BeDMDiceRoller running on Suse Linux with Flyab, without any change. Great work Team Maui

More on CUPS

I managed to compile the cups 1.1.23 source tree, but no drivers yet and it gives a Missing library error on startup. Probably I need to compile the rest of the cups tree as it contains the drivers and a database driven system for intergrating the drivers, called Foomatic.

To build Foomatic, I need the unix utility called File. I downloaded it and started porting that too. The newest version however did not compile due to the usage of mmap. So I downloaded an older version and it compiled after tampering a little with its code.

Tomorrow I will look into compiling the rest of the tree. But first I need to read a bit more on the architecture of CUPS.

CUPS

Today I restarted work on BeOS Max V4 and I had an epiphany...while talking to my BeOS friends on IRC who suggested it :-). Why not try and see what would be involved in porting CUPS to BeOS R5. It has already been ported to Zeta with success, so I downloaded the source code and started playing with it.

3 hours into fiddling with the source code, I have managed to compile more than 70% of CUPS. A few functions are missing from BeOS, but I believe I can have it fully compiled. Having it work though is another issue!