Re: porting to GNUstep from OSX

[Marcus Müller]

On Thursday, July 10, 2003, at 2:12 AM, Bill Northcott wrote:

> > I don't know how the header problem could be solved elegantly besides
> > using autoconf, but that wouldn't be acceptable on OSX anyways - it
> > just doesn't fit into the picture using PBX (or Xcode).
>
> Have a look at what Aqua tcl/tk do.  They use PB builds with a script 
> step
> that runs the configure script to set up the headers.  This code was
> largely done by Jim Ingham who is on Apple's payroll.

Yes, right, but that's a Unix package converted to OS X. Such action 
doesn't make sense for a native package, though. And, added to that, it 
doesn't work well with PBX (also Xcode) from the UI. Because OS X 
(Jaguar, Panther, etc.) is (mostly) a well defined environment it 
doesn't make sense to use autoconf - autoconf was designed to be able 
to produce working results of packages in (probably) unknown 
environments.

> As for Xcode, I have no idea, but I can't see tham breaking this
> mechanism.

Well, Xcode basically is PBX (with a slightly different UI), so no need 
to worry here. But, as stated above, you really wouldn't use autoconf 
for a native package on OS X. Apple provides its own mechanisms to deal 
with platform inconsistencies (i.e. in transition from Jaguar to 
Panther where behaviour changes slightly, Apple provides runtime checks 
etc.).

Cheers,

  Marcus

--
Marcus Mueller  .  .  .  crack-admin/coder ;-)
Mulle kybernetiK  .  http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com
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