.. willing to help with Gentoo/FreeBSD and Gnome.
Ok trying to summarize what the problem is. Yesterday a new gamin was released. Gamin is GNOME’s alternative to SGI’s FAM, and it’s currently the only FAM provider for Gentoo/FreeBSD (SGI’s FAM can work, but requires quite a few patches that I don’t want to mess with). Since version 0.1.0 is available, patched, on Gentoo’s portage, so that it can be installed with a simple emerge gamin on a G/FBSD system.
A few patches needed to be updated, usually taking them from ports, but the main patch, the kqueue engine (kqueue is FreeBSD’s equivalent of inotify, basically) was applied upstream a few versions ago. Now, more portability patches are applied on 0.1.6 version, so I had to relook at the patch as it wasn’t applying cleanly… most of the patches were applied, but one of the check was done in a way that doesn’t work as expected. I reported this, with a patch, in gnome bug #315615, and the maintainer applied the patch in a few hours, thanks Daniel.
Now what’s the problem? The problem is that I have to wait for someone to fix the kqueue engine to the new internal API that changed in 0.1.6 version to install it on Gentoo/FreeBSD. We need someone that would follow gamin development and make sure that kqueue engine is updated and the code works on Gentoo/FreeBSD.
I don’t have enough time to work on this, that’s why I’m asking for help… if someone is interested, please send me an email to flameeyes_at_gentoo_dot_org, and join #gentoo-bsd on FreeNode.
Gamin is not the only program that requires this treatment, also general GNOME has this problem and it’s not the only one. Pushing upstream the patches is the first important thing to make this work simpler, and is what it seems to be missing in FreeBSD’s ports handling process.
