OK, so here's my second try :-)
As a developer, I find the feature of being able to configure different
GNUSTEP_ROOT directories very useful. You can easily set up independent
GNUstep environments on a (potentially foreign) system for testing.
None the less, I'd agree to advocate '/' as the default /if/ we're sure
not to break anything, and I as don't have a Darwin system to play with
at that level, I can't test what may go wrong. (I guess that's why you
mentioned building them via /usr/GNUstep and then copying the
frameworks, but that feels rather hacky to me :-) )
I'm not sure what you mean. I have my gnustep-make installation in
something like /Users/nicola/Nicola/make-installation, and when I build
stuff, then I do
make install GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR=/
and it gets installed into Apple's /Library/Frameworks. I don't find that
hacky.
I quite like that the default gnustep-make installation directory is not
/, because it doesn't mess up my Apple stuff. Btw I wouldn't call it a
"GNUstep installation", but a "GNUstep make installation", which also
explains why it's not a big deal that it's not in '/', or that its
framework paths are not in the framework library path.
Maybe we could change the default GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR on Apple to be
'/', and the default directory structure to match more closely the Apple
one (if there is a need), so that default installation procedures should
work well even for bundles and such. That looks like a good idea to me.
Does it look like a good idea to you ?
If I'm an apple-apple-apple person and I want the GSWeb framework, I want
to download GSWeb.framework and install it in my /Library/Frameworks/,
then I want to be able to use it from my XCode (is that the name ?)
developer tools.
I don't want to know anything about GNUstep or gnustep-make. Sourcing
GNUstep.sh ? What's that ? Why that complication anyway ?
So my recommendation would be -
* install (you, David Ayers, not whoever will download the final binary
package) gnustep-make on your Apple machine in order to compile stuff
which uses a GNUmakefile. You can install gnustep-make into
~/make-install for example.
* source GNUstep.sh from the above installation when compiling.
* use GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR=/ when installing your frameworks. That
installs them into /Library/Frameworks (I suppose we could make this the
default on Apple).
* gnustep-make or GNUstep is not required to use the frameworks. They
are just Apple frameworks in the Apple directories, and you can distribute
them as such. Just go in /Library/Frameworks/ and grab them, make a .tgz
with all of them, and distribute it. The final user will just unpack them
in /Library/Frameworks/ and bam! it can use them in XCode.
I distribute Renaissance in such way and it's very popular for Apple Mac
OS X users.
I don't honestly see any need for using -F flags or setting yet another
framework library path, as I consider gnustep-make's installation on Apple
just a gnustep-make installation, and not a gnustep installation.
If you use gnu-gnu-gnu on Apple, that's a GNUstep installation, but it's a
completely different matter because it's not using the Apple framework
code.