Re: Newbie back again...

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi,

I surely won’t be able to fix all your problem but will try my best to 
understand what you are doing.
Let’s start from the end:

> My questions are:
> Is GNUstep project still alive?

Yes, GNUstep still seems to be alive. There just was a shared release of make, 
base, gun and back just a few days ago. You find this from the link on our 
homepage (I must admit I just edited the instruction for the backend, as it was 
correct, but the comment was out of date)

http://wwwmain.gnustep.org/resources/downloads.php?site=ftp%3A%2F%2Fftp.gnustep.org%2Fpub%2Fgnustep%2F

> Where is the "official repo" from where to get some recently 
> updated/synchronized material to successfully build (for eventually help to 
> debug) the GNUstep Libraries?


The "official repo“ i still and has been for many years the SVN on 

http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/gnustep/

As for installation instruction I would use this from the wiki:

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/GNUstep_SVN_Installation_Guide


> I've also noticed that there're multiple "official" INSTALL/BUILD 
> instructions files but none none seems to be able acheive its goals at least 
> for me (the real newbie) on my Debian 8 based system (clang3.9/llvm 3.9, 
> libobjc2 & libdispatch other required packages also being installed).

There is nothing bad about having multiple installation instructions. People 
prefer different tools and therefor may need different instructions. I for 
example, don’t use clang and could not be able to help you with that.

> After only 3 attempts at building GNUstep from sources, I eventually notice 
> that there're several ways to download the
> "official" current GNUstep packages/modules whatever we call it: at least svn 
> and git.
> It seems also that these two spots are not really synchronized, isn't it?

I think for a beginner it would be best not to start of with code that has been 
officially released. With the current source code there may always be tiny 
issues, but at the moment release and SVN are almost the same.
The GIT repository is in synch most of the time, but that synchronisation 
process may from time to time have problems. We will announce it, when we 
completely switch over to GIT.

Now to your actual problems:

> Am 22.04.2017 um 16:47 schrieb Yan Le Guen <yargwen@gmail.com>:
> 
> Me back again a bit desapointed... that's eventually explaining why so long 
> is this post...
> 
> Here is attached:
> 1) the output file resulting after executing the following command line after 
> having cd $BUILD_DIR/core/make (version 2.7 from svn) :
> ./configure --enable-debug-by-default --with-layout=gnustep 
> --enable-objc-nonfragile-abi

Did you also make and make install this package? And source the GNUstep.sh file 
after that? Sorry, but it is hard to guess what your did without any transcript.

> 2) the output file resulting after executing the following command line after 
> having cd $BUILD_DIR/core/base (version 1.5 from svn):
> ./configure

This output looks fine to me.

> 3) the output file resulting after executing the following command line after 
> having cd $BUILD_DIR/core/base :
> ./make -j2

Now this is the bit that I really don’t understand and I can see why this is 
frustrating for you. Something goes wrong and there is no telling what or why.
GNUstep make is filtering off most of the output. You need to switch the 
display of compile messages on by calling make with the variable messages set 
to yes. I think this gets done with this line, but I currently cannot test it.

„make messages=yes“  

This should display the actual line that goes wrong, most likely clang trying 
to compile its first Objective-C file. Perhaps your system is a bit confused 
whether it should be using gcc or clang. But this is only guessing.

Hope this helps,
Fred