I'm the current lead programmer/maintainer for two educational kids games, "Tux, Of Math Command" (basic math drill) and "Tux Typing" (learning to type).† Both are GPL free software with autotools-based builds, and all of the needed libs (SDL and friends, gettext) are already in MacPorts.

I'm new to the Mac.† Tuxmath builds and installs correctly with "./configure; make; sudo make install" and runs fine on our new Leopard Intel iMac.† I initially found your project while trying to figure out a straightforward way to get universal builds of the needed libs onto my system - I'm in the process of learning to make a universal package.

The first snag is that my program depends on SDL_image, and thus on smpeg, whose universal build currently fails, but I see there is already a bug on this from just a couple of days ago:

[ https://owa016.msoutlookonline.net/owa/redir.aspx?C=8ce54085a83c4de9bc3bbce7... ]http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/ticket/14174

It seems to me that what I should *really* do is to learn about your ports system, get my program set up for it and contribute it to MacPorts.

(fwiw, I understand that tuxmath is in the FreeBSD ports collection, although I am not involved with it - I assume studying the FreeBSD port of my project would be a good starting point?)

Also, is this list just for development of the port infrastructure itself, or is it also the place for help with individual ports by "client" programmers like me?

Hi David, Welcome to the Mac and MacPorts communities! I frequently look at FreeBSD ports before making a port to try to see if there are any challenges I may not be aware of, though it is always possible there will be challenges unique to OS X or MacPorts. The biggest problem you find with porting to MacPorts that doesn't bother FreeBSD porters is when when developers don't properly support the DESTDIR variable. MacPorts needs for that to work to have a legitimate port because MacPorts install to an intermediate location before it gets copied into place in the filesystem. For apps in this condition, I sometimes find OpenBSD has had to solve this problem too, so I check out their patches for DESTDIR support and sometimes use them as is, though I always make sure to send patches I make like that upstream since the apps really should be fixed at the source. Just looking at the FreeBSD port for tuxmath, I see no patches at all. That is a very good sign, especially since the FreeBSD folks seem to be sort of patch happy; many for reasons I can not figure out. So that one (didn't look at the other) should be a very trivial matter to port. See the guide (still in progress) and be sure to ask questions. http://guide.macports.org/ Mark