Tinkering Haiku apps and seeing changes

I have successfully built Haiku from source thanks to the helping Haiku community. Now I want to try tinkering with Haiku Apps so that I can get my feet wet into Haiku.

I made a simple change in webpositive and changed one of the authors name. To see the changes I rebuilt an iso and ran it by selecting “Boot Desktop option”. I want to know a better way of seeing changes I made to Haiku apps.

It’s easiest to build just the target, like with “jam -qj8 WebPositive”. At the end of the build process, it’ll output the path to the binary when doing the final touches", like:

...
XRes1 generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/apps/webpositive/WebPositive 
SetType1 generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/apps/webpositive/WebPositive 
MimeSet1 generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/apps/webpositive/WebPositive 
SetVersion1 generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/apps/webpositive/WebPositive 
Chmod1 generated/objects/haiku/x86/release/apps/webpositive/WebPositive 

If it’s only an app that needs to be built, you can now simply hold ALT and click on the path in the last line to launch the newly built app.

If you build something different that e.g. relies on a library (like Tracker needs its libtracker.so), you can copy the resulting binary somewhere and put the library into a subfolder “lib”.
When you execute the built app (in case of Tracker you’d first have to stop it being auto-restarted with “launch_roster stop x-vnd.Be-TRAK”), it’ll first look into its local “lib” folder for any libs, otherwise it uses the system’s version.

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