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I've suffered the pain of having to learn M4 and automake/conf. :-)

Ouch! :-)

Hi, Been there myself, been using autoconf (and the GNU build system, in general) on my own project for the past two years, and learn something new every week. I occasionally volunteer to autoconf-iscate projects that I care about, and that are in dire need of it. Please keep me CCd on the X.org port. I'm no expert, but am willing to help out where I can.

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Are you looking for someone who will work on BOTH X.org and Xfree? That's a big chunk of work...

At this point, all the activity appears to be on the X.org side. If you could help Torrey with getting X.org R7 to build on Darwin (using autoconf, I presume) he and I -- and many others -- would be grateful.

The new build system in R7 is fairly complicated:

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/ModularDevelopersGuide

The good is that it *is* more standard, since it uses autoconf. The bad news is that it is *different*, so Torrey is probably unclear what all needs to be changed, and the rest of us are *completely* clueless.

I've never looked into X11's build system, or much of its guts for that matter. I hope a fresh pair of eyes can be of use.

Of course, we might get lucky and it will all "just work" due to the magic of autoconf. The first step, I suspect, is merely to give it a shot and figure out what breaks. Torrey, have you even tried to tackle R7 yet, or are you focused on R6.9 functional issues?

One very useful starting point would be create a 'port' for R7, to capture the relevant learning and patches needed to make this all work. I'm a DarwinPorts guy, and could help you with that bit (if you have some time over the next week) -- unless the Fink guys have already done all that, which (as far as I can see) they have not:

http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/x11/inst-xfree86.php

Let me know if you (or anybody else, HINT HINT) are interested in tacking this, and we can start an offline thread.

Hint taken! David Fang Computer Systems Laboratory Electrical & Computer Engineering Cornell University http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/ -- (2400 baud? Netscape 3.0?? lynx??? No problem!) _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com