Re: Building frameworks on GNUstep Windows

[Alex Perez]

Andreas Höschler wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> we have installed GNUstep base on Windows using the the binary installer 
> (good work) and even managed to build gui. However, we encounter 
> problems while porting our frameworks to windows. Building any framework 
> gives us
>
> ...
> SRManager.m: undefined reference to '__objc_class_name_NSString'
> SRManager.m: undefined reference to '__objc_class_name_NSData'
> SRManager.m: undefined reference to '__objc_class_name_NSArray'
> C:\GNUstep\Development\msys\1.0\mingw\bin\dllwrap.exe: no export 
> definition file provided.
> Creating one. This might not what you want.
>
> Any idea what this means and how this can be fixed?

The short answer: This is a limitation/bug of/in GNUstep-make and needs 
to be fixed. If you explicitly tell the framework to link against 
GNUstep-base, it will compile, BUT.....the problem is a lot more complex 
than you may realize..

I recently ran across this myself. Frameworks under Windows are 
basically completely broken. Frameworks absolutely rely on symbolic 
links, which in turn relies on a filesystem which supports them (as well 
as userland tools which support the creation of real symbolic links). 
Now, NTFS didn't even support symbolic links until Windows XP (version 
5.1), and NTFS only had fetal hard-link support in Win2K. Currently, the 
mingw32 userland tools (and maybe the cygwin ones, but I don't know for 
sure) don't work the same. Since even with Windows XP, one cannot 
guarantee that the machine is using NTFS (XP, and possibly 2K, runs fine 
under FAT32, which has *ZERO* support for symbolic links), mingw32's 'ln 
-s' actually just performs a copy operation. This is very dirty and 
wrong, but it's the only safe way of dealing with the problem.

 The same makefile
> works great on Linux and Solaris. Has anybody ever managed to build a 
> framework under GNUstep windows?

It works, but as I stated above, you have to have duplicates of all your 
data, since symbolic links aren't something you can be sure of the 
existance of under XP or 2K. I've worked up a GNUstep-make patch which 
makes all frameworks build as libraries under win32. It's not in CVS 
yet. If you are interested in this patch and in the further makefile 
magic/changes required to make it work, let me know.

I hope you have found this informative, and if you've got any further 
questions, feel free to fire away...

Cheers,
Alex Perez