I just issued a 'darcs send' to James for the osx port (actually, I think I sent it to him 2 times, darcs newbie, sorry!) The port wasn't hard, mostly fixed up the macros and conditional compile directives. In the end the code changes aren't very intrusive. I do not expect the code changes to be rejected after James reviews them. On the other hand, I totally gutted the build system and started from ground zero with cmake (http://www.cmake.org/). This change might be controversial and I don't expect James to patch upstream right away, even with a code review. In fact, the patch breaks the old autotool build! The the old autotools will not compile Vanilla anymore unless someone goes back to the configure.in and strips out all of the include-files-as-macros-hackery that it does. Going to repeat the above. NOTE:: The osx/cmake patch BREAKS building with autotools! Why? First the selfish reasons. The autotools are a pita under osx. They pollute the system, seem to need constant tweaking, and generally not Mac-friendly. Next, what version of autotools? autoconf-2.63 or autoconf-2.13? automake1.4, automake1.7, automake1.8, or automake1.9? All? Some? Just ick! And we all hate m4, right? :-) Now the techincal (non-selfish) reasons. With cmake, you just need one tool; cmake. The 3 platforms we really care about are official supported (as well as others). http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html There's plenty of "cmake FTW!" in Google. Good read is why KDE moved to cmake http://lwn.net/Articles/188693/. What I'm most excited about are cmake generators. In short, the ability to generate native build "instructions". Like Makefiles for Linux, cygwin, even MinGW. NMake for Vistual C++. Xcode project files of osx. For specific info look here (http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/CMake_Generator_Specific_Information). And goodies, like CPack, for building software for your specific platform. For specific info look here (http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/CMake:CPackPackageGenerators). I'll work with James and the community to iron out all the rough spots. I am willing to do the work it takes to get cmake adopted as the build tool for the netrek-server. If that doesn't work, at least have cmake along side the autotools as a choice of build tool (cmake can co-exist with the autotools since it does out-of-source building (more later)). I'll continue to maintain the osx-branch of netrek-server until either of the 2 above situations present themselves. For specific info on the osx-netrek-branch look here (https://code.launchpad.net/~tanner/netrek-server/osx-branch). -- Bob Tanner <basic at us.netrek.org> Key fingerprint = F785 DDFC CF94 7CE8 AA87 3A9D 3895 26F1 0DDB E378