[ANNOUNCE] libbsd 0.3.0 released

[Mark Heily]

On 06/06/2011 05:15 AM, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-06-02 at 20:09:31 -0400, Mark Heily wrote:
>> >  Looks good, glad to see this project is moving forward. I especially
>> >  like the concept of overlaying the GNU system headers to add
>> >  additional functionality.
> Thanks!
>
>> >  I have been working on a project to port kqueue(2) from BSD to other
>> >  operating systems. Here's the link:
>> >
>> >     http://mark.heily.com/project/libkqueue
> Yeah, I was aware of it:), I've listed it on the draft I expect
> to convert to a generic porting guide [0], which I proposed on
> debian-bsd and debian-hurd [1].
>
>    [0]<http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/ports/porting>
>    [1]<http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2011/05/msg00059.html>
>
>> >  Perhaps this would make a useful addition to libbsd?
> Oh! I had considered proposing to maybe host libbsd, libkqueue, the
> upcoming libmd, the aforementioned porting guide, and probably other
> similar portable and porting projects in something like a
> porting.freedesktop.org or similar, but it had not really crossed my
> mind to actually propose to merge it into libbsd itself, as I guess
> I didn't even think you'd be amenable to that.
>
> Now when I considered it, I had mixed feelings about that, but yes, I
> think it seems to actually make sense to merge it.

I'm agreeable in principle, but I'm not sure a complete merge of the two 
projects will be feasible in the short term, given that libkqueue has 
already been ported to Windows and Solaris while libbsd is (AFAIK) Linux 
only at this point. I'll take a look at porting libbsd to these other 
platforms, but it may take some effort and time.

For now, what about just adding libkqueue as a dependency? Here are the 
basic steps:

  1. Add a symlink from <bsd/sys/event.h> to <kqueue/sys/event.h>
  2. Add "-lkqueue" to the libbsd LDFLAGS
  3. Add libkqueue0 to the libbsd debian/control Depends
  4. Add libkqueue-dev to the libbsd debian/control Build-Depends

This would allow you to expose kqueue() and kevent() as part of the libbsd 
API, even though the implementation resides in an external library.

Regards,

  - Mark