PORTING MG AND USING LIBBSD

I've maintained and ported mg for quite some time now and at first it was easy recently it got harder and harder, since it was a moving target. Especially the inclusion of some system specific libraries since about 2 years ago made it too much of an effort for my humble coding skills.

So recently Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse asked me to try it again and I restarted working on the project and ran into exactly the same problems again. While googling for solutions, I ran into libbsd:

http://libbsd.freedesktop.org/wiki/

It's a porting library for OpenBSD code! And after installing that, it was a piece of pie to get mg ported again.

PORTING TO ALL OTHER PLATFORMS

Okay, that was Linux. Now I have to get the rest of all the previously supported platforms working again. All help is welcome and as always: Please provide patches, that do not break stuff for other platforms.

BUILDING MG

So, basic instructions for building mg:

• Get the libbsd and libncurses dev packages installed.
• Run the following commands:

make
sudo make install

USING CMAKE

You can also build mg with cmake, it goes like this:

• Get the libbsd and libncurses dev packages installed.
• Run the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
sudo make install

Kudos to Leonid Bobrov(@mazocomp) for adding CMAKE support.

USING MESON

You can also build mg using meson:

• Get the libbsd and libncurses dev packages installed.
• Run the following commands:

meson setup build
meson compile -C build
sudo meson install -C build

STATIC BUILDS (on Linux)

I recently figured out how to make really portable static builds: On an alpine linux system, build with the command:

make STATIC=yesplease

The default glibc provided with almost any other linux version does not really support static binaries. https://www.musl-libc.org/ does not have this problem.

To make building static binaries more easy, check the mg-static directory, there is a script which can build static binaries with support of podman and buildah.

USING CVS

This code is the cvs checkout from the OpenBSD project, so if you install cvs you can see the changes I made to make mg portable; Like this:

CVS_RSH=ssh cvs diff -uw

FEATURE REQUESTS

I just maintain the port, all I do is importing all changes from the upstream OpenBSD mg repository:

https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/mg/?sortby=date#dirlist

So your best course of action is to send them a feature request, or even better, send them a patch.

OUT OF SYNC

If you noticed portable mg is not in sync with the upstream release, feel free to drop me a note and I'll update it ASAP.