libSystem is the most essential library within DeforaOS, with the aim to become a complete C runtime (thus obsoleting the libc and replacing its API). Regardless of its progress in this regard, libSystem is intended to be portable and work on any system, using any POSIX-compliant runtime as fallback if available.

With GCC, this should be enough:

$ make

To install libSystem in a dedicated directory, like /path/to/libSystem:

$ make PREFIX="/path/to/libSystem" install

Alternatively, it is possible to re-generate the Makefiles for the current platform with configure(1) from the DeforaOS configure project, found at https://www.defora.org/os/project/16/configure. The procedure is then as follows:

$ configure
$ make

Please refer to the documentation of DeforaOS configure for further instructions.

A default set of Makefiles is provided with this project in order to avoid a circular dependency, as DeforaOS configure depends on libSystem itself. The Makefiles provided target the NetBSD Operating System https://www.netbsd.org/ by default.

Part of libSystem's API can also be accessed from within the Python programming language. This binding is not compiled or installed by default though. After installing libSystem as documented above, the Python interface can be built and installed as follows:

$ (cd src/python && make install)

Likewise, an alternate installation directory may be specified:

$ (cd src/python && make PREFIX="/path/to/libSystem" install)

Makefiles can be re-generated for the bindings as well:

$ configure src/python

libSystem may fail to build on macOS, with the following error:

ld: unknown option: -soname

To work around this issue, it is possible to:

1. Build the static library, libSystem.a:

   $ (cd src && make libSystem.a)

2. Build DeforaOS configure with this library

3. Re-generate the Makefiles and build as follows:

   $ configure $ make LDFLAGS=-lm

The Python bindings are outdated and still assume Python 2.7.