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GNUstep questions and comments
From: |
Peter Schols |
Subject: |
GNUstep questions and comments |
Date: |
Tue, 26 Oct 2004 13:42:55 +0200 |
Dear GNUStep developer,
I'm a biologist and self-made Cocoa developer. Over the past few years,
I have heard a lot about GNUstep but I never took the time to give it a
serious look.
Yesterday, I finally installed GNUstep on a Windows 2000 machine. The
reason I'm trying out GNUstep is to port my bioinformatics apps and
frameworks to Linux and Windows. First of all, I must say I'm impressed
with the current state of the frameworks! I was able to build the
entire core library, including gui and back. Running graphical apps
works quite well, even on Windows!
However, I still have a few questions and some suggestions.
Here are my questions:
- I built the core libs without (much) problems. However, I can't seem
to compile Gorm or ProjectCenter. While building Gorm, I get the
following error (using Gorm 0.8.0, MinGW, Windows 2000):
.../mingw/bin/dllwrap.exe: no export definition file provided. Creating
one but that may not be what you want.
.../mingw/bin/dllwrap.exe: gcc exited with status 1
some more errors related to this. Any clues?
- Launching a GNUstep app (by double-clicking the .exe file in
Explorer) always yields a command prompt window. Is there an easy way
to avoid this?
- I'd like to bundle the compiled .exe together with all .dll files,
gdomap.exe and gdnc.exe into one executable Windows file. I'm looking
for some hints to do this.
My comments:
- In its current state, GNUstep is a great environment and it makes
Cocoa/ObjC even more attractive for bioinformatics. Major
bioinformatics journals require that applications run on all major
platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). While I could just write my apps
in Java, I really like ObjC and Cocoa. GNUstep is the perfect tool to
port Cocoa apps to other platforms. Congratulations!
- Now that a lot of work has been done and GNUstep runs on Windows and
Linux, it would be great if there were Windows installers for the
entire core (including libtiff, ...). That would really drive GNUstep
adoption since I know a lot of Cocoa developers interested in bringing
their apps to GNUstep but hesitant to spend days to get everything up
and running. I think a lot of developers are even willing to pay for a
good Windows GNUstep installer, which would benefit the GNUstep project
even more.
- I'd like to underscore the importance of the graphical appearance of
GNUStep apps on Windows and other platforms. If GNUStep Windows apps
could get support for native Windows menus and other controls, that
would be killer! I'm guess this would not be so difficult when compared
with the effort that has already been done.
I'm well aware that GNUStep is a community initiative and that it is
dependent upon the hard work of only a handful of people. I'm always
willing to help the GNUstep project but I'm not a 'real programmer',
just a biologist writing apps. However, I'll definitely promote GNUStep
in the Cocoa/Bioinformatics community as much as I can.
Keep up the great work!
Best wishes,
Peter
Peter Schols
Laboratory of Plant Systematics - K.U.Leuven
www.kuleuven.ac.be/bio/sys
Kasteelpark Arenberg 31
3001 Leuven
Belgium
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