[omniORB] I Want to Port OmniORB to NetBSD

[Zed A. Shaw]

Hi,

I'm the developer on several projects (listed at the end) which will be 
using OmniORB.  While NetBSD is not one our primary targets, it is the 
machine I've decided to do most of my work in (because of the nice 
cross platform development capabilities).  After looking at the build 
system (very nice BTW), I thought it would be trivial to port OmniORB 
over to NetBSD, and I'm willing to do the work and submit it back to 
the project.  Not only that, but I'm willing to write a very 
comprehensive Porting HOWTO for future reference.

I would only need a bit of help from one of the developers who can give 
me information on the build system, and what would need touching up.  I 
have experience with autoconf, automake, and such, but OmniORB uses 
an...interesting...layout which I can't quite understand properly.  I 
actually prefer using SCons, but I'm sure nobody want to move there (no 
matter how sexy it is :-).

So, if someone can shoot me an offline e-mail to help me walk through 
the build, I'll get to work and put up a doc in the OmniORB wiki about 
porting.  The main questions I'll need to know are:

1.  Alright, so you've autoconf detecting the host and such in 
configure.ac (which becomes configure).  Now, what version of autoconf 
do you use?  How do you run it for your project (each one is different 
it seems).  Is there a bootstrap.sh script that you use or do you do it 
by hand?

2.  Once it is built, it seems that there are only a few places where 
the __blah__ macros are used to configure the system.  Is it correct to 
assume that the majority of these platform macros are in the omnithread 
package?

3.  NetBSD has had some troubles with pthreads in the past, but now 
seems very much up to par with other OS.  Would it be worth it to try 
and get pth to work as a drop in replacement for pthreads?  I think 
this would really make OmniORB more portable in the future, and may 
even give it a bit of a speed boost (I'm just guessing).

4.  Finally, is there a developer or contributor document that I can 
use to learn your check-in procedures and such?

That should be a good start.  Like I said, I'm willing to do the work 
for this if someone can "coach" me along the way.  Please send your 
replies to me offline of the list (unless you think the list will 
benefit).

Thanks.

-----
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/