General porting advice

[Don Y <dgy%caramail.com@localhost>]

Hi,

I have several applications for which NetBSD ports do not exist.
Some have ports to other OSs available (often buggy); others
(e.g., those for which I am the author/owner) are unsupported
on all of the "main" FOSS OSs.

What is the generally accepted practice for making these available
to NetBSD/amd64 users?  (I run 9.1R and have no need nor desire to
upgrade so that's the second problem, after the architectural choice)

Is it best to work with the original authors of the applications
and encourage them to include my diffs to enable this support in
their original distributions?  Or, is it easier/more practical to
deal with their current, published releases and patch those
after-the-fact?

How (who) will support for other architectures be verified?

I assume it prudent to run the applications "for a while" to
increase the chances of stumbling on porting problems (assuming
the applications have no specific problems of their own :> )
before releasing them "into the wild" -- because few applications
have formal test suites.  (and, that period should vary with the
complexity of the application)

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