I've been working on merging some FreeBSD code in the past couple of weeks. First, I pulled down FreeBSD's make code and /usr/share/mk suite, merged that into bsdmake in Darwin, and then tossed PB makefiles and got it building with its own makefiles. So now bsdmake builds with itself, so we know that it works for building BSD commands in Darwin. The goal here is to facilitate building BSD libraries without having to rewrite the makefiles, as I have been doing with the BSD commands. Munging the makefiles makes updating the code more troublesome, so I'd like to avoid that going forward.

I got libtelnet ported from FreeBSD as well, which was a good starting point, since it only has two clients in Darwin and it's static. Libc is probaby going to have to be next, which won't be as easy. Since it's going into the System framework, it can also build static, but making sure that existing programs don't all fall over will be difficult. Also, the fact that BSD keeps library headers separate from code (it's in include/, instead of lib/) makes it harder to keep things organized. We'll need some additional bsdmake/mk tweaks to get things going, and Chuck Swiger has been working on that some, which I'll take a look at next week.

I also talked to Jordan recently about giving people better access to the Darwin code, since right now you need to register to use CVS, even for the non-APSL parts of the repository. So I've been experimenting with a way to make the non-APSL parts visible anonymously via a side repository. We're also kicking around ideas for how to share code in "real time" rather than merging back and forth.

This week I'm at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey. Yesterday I went to Prof. McKusick's tutorial on the BSD kernel, which was great, since I work almost exclusively outside of the kernel, and getting a better picture of what's inside is useful stuff.

Tonight, I'll be at the MacPerl BoF, so I can get a feel for what the MacPerl guys would like to bring forward to Mac OS X. The Apache beerfest is also tonight, but I'll probably miss it due to the BoF. Thursday I'm be on a panel on the Future of BSD, representing Darwin/Mac OS X.