[impdev] Porting to FreeBSD ... and irritations

[Nathan Lay]

So, I'm working on porting this to FreeBSD for fun ... luckily all code 
I've come across for LL_LINUX, LL_SOLARIS and LL_DARWIN apply to 
directly FreeBSD (for POSIX and BSD reasons) so it hasn't been terribly 
difficult so far. I can build up to 30% of the entire project now (not 
sure it actually _works_ though).

So far, I've run into some irritations that make porting more difficult, 
namely: STANDALONE, python and glh

1) STANDALONE
You use the CMake build system ... why in the world would you need to 
distinguish the build as a standalone build or not? It's trivial to 
direct CMake to the right paths with the curses 'ccmake' and cmake-GUI 
on Windows ... so why complicate the configuration process and check for 
prebuilt libraries in strange directories in the non-standalone 
scenario, and for system libraries otherwise?

2) Python
What's the point of using this to invoke cmake? Everything needed is 
already in CMake. You can make option variables (like STANDALONE for 
--standalone) and get the system platform and processor without needing 
python scripts.

3) glh
This one is stumping me. I saw a header snippit ... written in 2000 and 
even includes template hacks (for when there were C++ compilers that may 
not have supported templates). It's virtually absent on the Internet ... 
it appears unmaintained and unused, so why is this relied upon? It seems 
to be distributed under a BSDL-like license so you could perhaps include 
it in Imprudence (which would be convenient since it seems to be hard to 
find).

Best Regards,
Nathan Lay