Hello,

I have looking at porting balsa, a gnome email client to MacOS X. If 
someone already has balsa running, please let me know, and I shall 
cease and desist :-). I started effort after searching the package 
database and mailing lists, and not finding any mention of it.

Balsa requires libesmtp, so I am tackling that right now. I now have 
a preliminary build. However, during the process, a few questions 
came up. I did read the porting manual, but I may have missed 
something, so forgive me if I am asking silly questions.

1. The libesmtp source requires some header files currently not 
available on MacOS X, specifically byteswap.h and sys/poll.h. Right 
now, I have my own versions of those files, but is there a clean way 
of packaging extra files?

2. I have noticed that many packages make calls to functions that are 
not available on MacOS X. Examples are localtime_r() and poll(). I am 
sure there are more. While porting these packages, maintainers roll 
implementations of these functions into some source file of the 
package as a patch. Does it make sense to build a separate library 
"finkutils" that provides these missing functions that other packages 
then could just link against? Or is such a functionality already 
there?

3. libesmtp uses libtool 1.4. The fink "Porting Tips" page talks 
about 3 potential patches to be applied. I have applied the first one 
(-flat_namespace), but not the "load module" and "convenience 
library" patches. I am not clear on whether I need to apply them. The 
source seems to be building fine, so maybe I should just leave well 
alone, but I wanted to be sure.

That's all I can think of. If anyone has ideas about these, please 
feel free to share.

Thanks,

Ujwal

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