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From: | Richard Frith-Macdonald |
Subject: | Re: GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN |
Date: | Fri, 13 Oct 2006 09:08:55 +0100 |
On 13 Oct 2006, at 04:58, Nicola Pero wrote:
Things should be decoupled ... -make and -base don't really talk or dependon each other.Not entirely true. Currently -base depends on -make for configuration.Thanks, I see your point ... which is a very good one :-)You're suggesting that, for example, in a binary distribution (say, Debian)you could install gnustep-base without installing gnustep-make.Then you can also install any other GNUstep software that is binary packaged by the distribution. You don't need gnustep-make, because everything is in the FHS locations and you're not building anything, you're just installingbinary packages. I agree it would be a nice thing :-)In that case, yes, you would need GNUstep.conf, yet you have no gnustep-makeinstalled. I suppose the right way of addressing the issue is to create a 'gnustep-common' package, that only installs GNUstep.conf.Then, on top of that, you can install gnustep-make and/or gnustep- base;you only install gnustep-make if you want to build.We could make all this explicit by extracting the creation of GNUstep.confintoa separate software ... to be installed before gnustep-make. It soundsvery clumsy though ;-) At the moment, I'd leave everything as it is (a packager could still install GNUstep.conf in a separate package to get the effect above).
This all sounds complex ... and seems to be based on accepting both that gnustep-base depends on gnustep-make for configuration and the assumption that this is a problem. The flaw in that is that base does not depend on make for config information (unless it's been broken recently), it merely uses it at configure/build time if it is present and not overridden. Even if base did depend on make for config information, I don't see it as much of a problem, since if we ever had another package capable of building the base library I'm sure it could be made able to provide any necessary config information for it too.
Moving the creation of GNUstep.conf into gnustep-base doesn't make muchsense,because gnustep-make can't work without it. You may want to use gnustep-make without gnustep-base (eg, for building documentation or resources or javastuff, or for building using non-gnustep-base foundation libraries, eg on apple-apple-apple or gnu-fd-nil), and at the moment you can't build gnustep-base without gnustep-make anyway ;-)
Yes, gnustep-make required GNUstep.conf, but gnustep-base does not. But even if it was required by base, we could deal with the problem when we produced another package capable of building base.
Anyway, good idea to keep it in mind, I mean, yes, conceptually, the stepof creating GNUstep.conf is separate from gnustep-make and gnustep-base. It's a "preliminary" step if you want. ;-)
Yes, analagous to running a configure script ... it's where you set up various options.
Yes ... we're not really "almost done". :-( ... we also need to have gnustep-base loadthe directory structure from GNUstep.conf and use it when searching forstuffat runtime :-/For long lived processes this might be fine but for short lived toolsyou'reimposing a considerable startup delay.There is already such a delay, since we are already reading GNUstep.conf.I doubtadding ten more lines or so to read would make any difference in speed.If we could avoid reading the file altogether, that would be faster. ;-)
Yes, but not much faster ... on my system it takes half a millisecond to do the whole process of reading and parsing configuration info ... that includes loading both the system GNUstep.conf and my user specific one overriding some values in the system-wide one.
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