BSD make on other systems

The topic of using a “BSD make” on other systems seems to pop up now and then. I haven’t really finished the automake-based ‘port’ of FreeBSD make that I started some time ago, but seeing that others are interested too is a bit nice. A recent post by Chuck Robey to the freebsd-arch mailing list brought up the issue again.

I’ve been trying to work on bmake since earlier this year, but then I switched jobs, and real life ate a large chunk of my summer, so the port started getting pretty stale. Then I finished a “minimal” set of changes that allow building FreeBSD make on Linux. The patches are still a bit messy and I have to cean them up a bit before they are pushed to hg.hellug.gr, but I think I should try to make the time to commit this now.

I wrote to freebsd-arch a few minutes ago with a description of the changes. A short textual description of the changes is not as useful as actually seeing the patchset itself, but first I want to verify that they work and that they are integrated with the original automake stuff.

With a bit of luck, I’ll have this ready for committing to the online tree by the end of the week.

Then we can start worrying about the trickier part of the “port”: how to reuse as much as possible of all the bsd.*.mk includes that the FreeBSD developers have developer over the years. That is going to be “fun”, but we’ll see how it goes.