Building bees

Dependencies

• C++11 compiler (tested with GCC 8.1.0, 12.2.0)

  Sorry. I really like closures and shared_ptr, so support for earlier compiler versions is unlikely.

  Note that the C++ standard–and GCC’s implementation of it–is evolving. There may be problems when building with newer compiler versions. Build failure reports welcome!

• btrfs-progs

  Needed at runtime by the service wrapper script.

• Linux kernel version gets its own page.

• markdown to build the documentation

• util-linux version that provides blkid command for the helper script scripts/beesd to work

Installation

bees can be installed by following one these instructions:

Arch package

bees is available for Arch Linux in the community repository. Install with:

$ pacman -S bees

or build a live version from git master using AUR:

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/bees-git.git && cd bees-git && makepkg -si

Gentoo package

bees is officially available in Gentoo Portage. Just emerge a stable version:

$ emerge --ask bees

or build a live version from git master:

$ emerge --ask =bees-9999

You can opt-out of building the support tools with

USE="-tools" emerge ...

If you want to start hacking on bees and contribute changes, just emerge the live version which automatically pulls in all required development packages.

Build from source

Build with make. The build produces bin/bees which must be copied to somewhere in $PATH on the target system respectively.

It will also generate scripts/beesd@.service for systemd users. This service makes use of a helper script scripts/beesd to boot the service. Both of the latter use the filesystem UUID to mount the root subvolume within a temporary runtime directory.

Ubuntu 16.04 - 17.04:

$ apt -y install build-essential btrfs-tools markdown && make

Ubuntu 18.10:

$ apt -y install build-essential btrfs-progs markdown && make

Packaging

See ‘Dependencies’ above. Package maintainers can pick ideas for building and configuring the source package from the Gentoo ebuild:

https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/tree/master/sys-fs/bees

You can configure some build options by creating a file localconf and adjust settings for your distribution environment there.

Please also review the Makefile for additional hints.