Re: Using XCTOOL

[Maxthon Chan]

I am thinking rewriting buildtool using CoreFoundation API to break dependency 
on gnustep-make and gnustep-base.

I am thinking creating forks of base, libobjc2 and corebase projects and 
rearrange some code, to resolve some compatibility issues and modernise code to 
take as many advantage as possible of ARC, as well as drop some old obsolete 
features like GC. During which I think I will drop the make package as it is 
under documented and confusing to me, as well as not being as helpful as Xcode 
project files (try file-specific build options, like -fobjc-arc when building 
everything but container types in base.) This means the new base will have to 
be built using xcodebuild-ng (the CF port of buildtool) or we will have a 
chicken-or-egg problem.

The new build procedure would be libobjc2 (Blocks runtime probably will be 
either dropped in favour of libBlocksRuntime, or separated into a 
libBlocksRuntime replacement, optionally depend on libllvm), CoreBase (depend 
on libobjc2, libBlocksRuntime and libdispatch), xcodebuild-ng (depend on 
CoreBase), and finally Base (depend on CoreBase, built using xcodebuild-ng)

I am investigating how DPRK packaged their Linux apps into Apple-styled 
bundles, and if there is any knowledge I can lift, it will be applied in 
xcodebuild-ng.

> On Apr 7, 2015, at 00:54, Gregory Casamento <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Maxthon,
> 
> On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 11:42 AM, ChanMaxthon <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Is it favorable for us to build a clone of xcodebuild?
> 
> One already exists.  It's in dev-libs and dev-apps.  The dev-libs
> portion is a library called XCode and the dev-apps portion is the
> front end called "buildtool."
> 
> It is not 100% complete, but can build most xcode projects.  Feel free
> to contribute to it.  If you have any questions about it please ask
> me.
> 
>> Maybe we don't use Objective-C for now (Java or C# initially) but that can 
>> be a start of a development
>> environment more friendly to existing OS X and iOS developers that is tied 
>> to Xcode by Apple.
> 
> I'm wondering why we should use any language other than ObjC.
> 
> GC
> -- 
> Gregory Casamento
> GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
> http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
> http://ind.ie/phoenix/