Regarding to port software, I think there are several kinds:
a) For the simplest case, one tool is created for Linux, and you want to use it on FreeBSD. Because there is no out-of-box package for this Operating System, you grab the code and compile it yourself, no complaint from compiler. Run it and it seems work, bingo! This should be a perfect experience!
b) The life will become pleasant if everything is similar to the above case, but in reality it is definitely not. Sometimes, the progress can’t go so smoothly. Take socket programming as an example, the Solaris has some specific requirements if you are only familiar with Linux environment (Please check this post). So you may tweak the compiler options and even customoize your code to fit your requirement in this scenario.
c) The third case is you need to read the whole software source code and do modifications, and this is what I am currently doing. Back to this Monday, I received a task to verify a conception. I remembered there is an Open Source framework which has implemented similar function, so I downloaded and went through the code carefully. Fortunately, this project indeed satisfies our requirement, but since our computation environment is Nvidia GPU, I need to use CUDA APIs to replace the related code besides integrate this framework into our code repository. If no other accidents, I think I can finish the whole work in next week.
From my personal experience, porting software is really rewarding! Take this week’s work as an example, I learnt a new C++ library and refreshed my knowledge of graph data structure. Furthermore, porting software can also give you fun: after several hours even days’ hard work, a bespoken tool can meet your requirement, that will let you feel very filled!
At the end, I must declare I don’t encourage you should be lazy and don’t think problems yourself; instead you should leverage the resource rationally. Moreover, please conform to the software license, and don’t violate it.
Enjoy porting!