Re: gdnc crash

[Nicola Pero]

> > Please check that you have the latest gnustep-make from CVS, install 
> > it, and watch to make sure it installs GNUstep.conf properly.
>
> I haven't checked if this is the case, but GNUstep should not rely on 
> GNUstep.conf being installed, but still use compiled in default values 
> if it isn't found.

Yes ... totally agree ... that's supposed to happen, if GNUstep.conf is
not found, default paths should be used. :-)

(let's fix it if it's a bug and it's not working that way)


> GNUstep Startup and my testing scripts, as well as perhaps many other
> packaging systems rely on the fact that we can compile (and run) GNUstep
> without having root access.

That should certainly be possible ... and probably easier now than before!
:-)

Just install your own GNUstep.conf wherever you want
(/tmp/1j2k354/GNUstep.conf ?) containing whatever paths you want, then set
the main/only environment variable GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE to point to it ...  
and both gnustep-base and gnustep-make should find the config file
automatically and use it. (I believe an empty GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE should
cause no config file to be read and the compiled-in defaults to be used
with no warnings, but I suppose we need to check if that really works).

The expectation is that GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE is the only variable that will
need to be set to run anything GNUstep related ... (in most situations)  
... and even GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE is optional because if you don't set it,
the default config file location compiled in gnustep-make/gnustep-base
will be used (any standard installation will work that way).

There won't be any more need to source GNUstep.(c)sh!  gnustep-make will
work by just using the single environment variable GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES.  
This will be another wave of enhancements though (once the dust has
settled on our first wave), it's not there yet.

Anyway, yes there might be changes to do for setup/packaging scripts, but
we'll get a lot of advantages from the change, so it seems worht it
(gnustep-make will require the single GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES environment
variable to be set to work, gnustep-base will require no environment setup
whatsoever; native unix (or windows! [shivering]) paths will be supported
-- and still with no setup whatsoever but GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES!; good,
standardized config system that works; etc).


> In fact, I'm a bit against even installing GNUstep.conf, or if we do, 
> only as a template - with all the settings commented out. So that 
> someone could use it to change the settings if they want, but otherwise 
> it would revert to the defaults

I suppose it doesn't really matter if when we release GNUstep.conf
contains settings commented out or not ... since the defaults will be
identical to the settings in GNUstep.conf. :-)

... but it certainly helps testing if we keep them uncommented out for now
... so that GNUstep.conf will be used when people install stuff from CVS,
and the stuff gets tested and we will get reports of problems. ;-)

Thanks