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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news-peer.sprintlink.net!news-pull.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!Sprint!chi-news.cic.net!data.ramona.vix.com!nnrp1.crl.com!not-for-mail From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD development question Date: Mon, 19 May 1997 05:05:32 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 35 Message-ID: <3380420C.794BDF32@FreeBSD.org> References: <337F43DC.371@XXsnet.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) To: Sonya and Jeffrey Metcalf <metcalf@snet.net> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:41188 Sonya and Jeffrey Metcalf wrote: > I would like to get into some more serious software development on > FreeBSD, but I need to learn some of the basics. For now, I was > wondering how some of the complex makefiles I see in the FreeBSD > ports are generated. Does the developer actually do this by hand? Yep! Consider that the Makefile is actually the least of what makes up a port. You also need to configure the files in the patches/ and pkg/ directories, for one thing, and those are *highly* specific to the port in question. Same goes for any special files/ that the port needs. Automating the information there is theoretically possible, sure, just not as trivial as you might think. The actual Makefile editing portion of the task is largely trivial and the least of what goes into a port. :-) Also bear in mind that a lot of folks don't see the make syntax as quite so arcane, having worked with it over many, many large software projects, so it's not all that difficult to deal with. > Also, does anyone know of any integrated development environments > for UNIX (FreeBSD) that would closely approximate some of the > capabilities of the Borland C++ Builder or the Borland Delphi > development environments? Hopefully these questions are good ones. There are some tools for building X applications, like specTCL or Xforms, but nothing even remotely approaching something like Borland's IDE. Seems evolution just didn't head in that direction over in UNIX-ville. -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.