# 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 Debian. 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.*

## 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
```
glibc 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 what I changed to port mg. Like this:

```
CVS_RSH=ssh cvs diff -uw
```

## FEATURE REQUESTS
I just maintain the port, so I import all changes from OpenBSD mg:
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, to send them a patch. Once it has been implemented you
can ask me to sync with the upstream repo, and I'll do that ASAP.