Re: Online GNUstep Application Database

[Alexander Malmberg]

Damian Steer wrote:
> As a followup to this it would be nice if the archive had downloadable
> binaries...
> 
> Which leads me to the point of this post. To what degree is this
> possible in GNUstep?

Sure, they're possible. Practical is a different matter. ;-)

As long as you stay with single-arch binaries, you won't have any (new)
problems. Some distros already do this with GNUstep apps. No harder to
manage than normal binaries, but also no better.

> I notice that I have 'GNUSTEP_FLATTENED="yes"',
> but seem to recall something like fat binary support in the past (I
> guess flattening is the default now?). Being able to unpack and use a
> single .app, even if it is on the 'chubby' side, would be very
> nice.

If GNUSTEP_FLATTENED is no, you get something like 'fat binaries', if
you can figure out a way of building them (short of manually building
lots of .app:s on different systems and manually assembling them).

> (/me looks grumpily at individual linux apps evenly distributed
> over the entire filesystem).

This sounds like an unrelated problem.

> However a quick ldd on Calculator suggests it would be impractical. It
> seems to be linked to libungif, libpng12, etc beyond just the gnustep
> libs, which I assume is a limitation of the linux linker. OS X seems
> to have a funky linker which can refer to frameworks, hence isolating
> such dependencies.

ldd tells you which libraries it would be linked to if you ran it now on
your system. Thus, it includes indirect references (like linungif, which
is probably linked to by -gui). To get a list of direct references, do
"objdump -x Foo.app/Foo" and look at the "Dynamic section" part.

- Alexander Malmberg