Re: Windows and Gnustep

[Christopher Armstrong]

> Would it be possible for you to post the procedure for doing this so  
> that others can try using cygwin (or better still, patches so that a  
> build on cygwin will work out-fo-the-box)?
> I ask because none of the gnustep developers has been using cygwin
> as  
> far as I know, and I've seen several reports saying it won't build.
> 
> The pure windows (mingw32) version on the other hand builds from svn  
> readily simply by following the procedure in the README.MinGW in the  
> gnustep-back package.

I should have been clearer when I originally wrote this email. I only
meant to refer to cygwin as something to try at the beginning of my
email. I was referring to building under mingw, trying to get around all
the annoying GNUstep.conf problems that have been driving me up the
wall. It kept finding my old configuration, amongst other things, as
well as retaining those settings when I went to rebuild. This was under
mingw.

I have used cygwin successfully in the past, but I know its not a long
term option due to both its size and its licensing requirements
(commercial software would need to be GPL to satisfy cygwin's
provisions, from what I can make of the special "Open Source" provisions
attached to the public licence). I merely suggested it as a way to get
gnustep building, as I have found it operates in a more unix like
manner, emulating many of the unix-like features that GNUstep uses
heavily in a better way.

> > BTW, the
> > GNUstep.conf file path seems to be hardcoded into gnustep-make,  
> > that it
> > keeps going to /c/GNUstep/GNUstep.conf-dev.
> 
> It's a configurable option ('configure --help' for details)
> 
> > On yet another side note, despite having built GNUstep for me in the
> > past, it would appear Gorm has regressed (it can't find it's
> bundles,
> > even though the bloody things are in Gorm.app/Resources).
> 
> Strange ... works for me with mingw32 ... perhaps a cygwin specific  
> problem?
> 
> > If I may make a suggestion to the community, it would be providing a
> > pre-built Mingw/Msys environment with all the ffcall and
> > tiff/jpeg/png/iconv/libintl/libobjc/etc binaries already inserted
> into
> > it (without GNUstep compiled), so that developers can get started
> > building GNUstep straight away.
> 
> I believe the windows installer does that (though with a ready built  
> GNUstep too).  My understanding is that it's supposed to give you
> the  
> whole environment, then you can update the source and rebuild  
> whate3ver version you want.

I didn't mean to suggest something replacing this environment, merely
complimenting it with a download that had all the libraries bar GNUsteps
so that people could start off directly from source. Its probably not
that important.

> > This might help save about 2 of the 3
> > hours usually required before actually building GNUstep on Windows  
> > that
> > is spent finding and installing all these little files.
> 
> Yes, while locating things is trivial (the README.MinGW tells you  
> where to get everything), downloading/installing the dependencies  
> slow/tedious, especially when the sites concerned are overloaded/down.

I guess this only applies if you are like me and like to setup clean
sandbox environments to test things. At work, I constantly rebuild all
our packages from Source to get rid of old dependencies and issues
creaping in from new code in low-level modules.

Regards 
Chris