Port the Enlightenment desktop environment to NetBSD

This report details the work of Dimitris Gounaridis as part of Google Summer of Code 2026, focusing on porting the Enlightenment desktop environment to NetBSD. Enlightenment is a lightweight desktop environment that maintains visual quality without consuming excessive resources. NetBSD's support for this BSD-licensed desktop has lagged behind for several years.

The project aims to port the latest version of Enlightenment to pkgsrc, NetBSD's package management system, and commit upstream portability fixes to simplify future updates. The author expresses gratitude to mentors Leonardo Taccari (leot) and Nia Alarie (nia) for their support during the project's initial phase. They also thank Carsten Haitzler (raster) from the Enlightenment project, Robert Bagdan (kikadf), and Matthew Danielson for their earlier contributions to Enlightenment in pkgsrc-wip.

Development was conducted using Ubuntu 26.04 with a QEMU virtual machine installation of NetBSD-11.0 and a laptop with Intel N3540 (Bay Trail) running a bare-metal NetBSD-11.0 installation. Enlightenment already offers upstream support for FreeBSD and OpenBSD, providing a useful starting point. The project utilized existing build dependencies available in pkgsrc, which proved beneficial.

After some trial and error to resolve build errors, the author discovered the necessary commands to compile Enlightenment successfully under NetBSD. The window manager component required additional patching for compatibility with NetBSD. The author notes that these patches have already been merged upstream (thanks to raster) to align with other BSD systems.

The window manager component of the desktop environment required some patching to function correctly on NetBSD. The necessary changes can be tracked in this pull request (accessible with an account as of the writing date). Following the steps outlined in this progress report should result in a fully operational Enlightenment desktop environment on NetBSD.

The author highlights that there are still a few issues to address, which will be covered in the subsequent progress report. These remaining issues are not specified in detail. This project has provided a valuable opportunity for Dimitris to work with various technologies he has not previously encountered. He gained insights into NetBSD, its package management system (pkgsrc), and the differences between NetBSD and Linux.

Additionally, the author used and experimented with QEMU, virt-manager, and Meson during the development process.