Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Chris Hanson]

At 4:32 AM -0400 4/14/03, Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> PB is decent for one-offs, or for people who are new to this whole
> programming thing. For that reason alone, it's good to have...but it's not
> a replacement for a proper shell environment.
I suspect you're actually referring to GNUstep ProjectCenter (PC) 
above and not Apple/NeXT Project Builder.
Project Builder is a development environment that thousands of very 
experienced developers spend their daily professional lives using.
> GNUstep Makefiles are (for me, and most other developers using GNUstep)
> too easy to write to give up the flexibility of writing them by hand. PC
> and PB are neat to play with and use to throw together a trivial app, but
> neither is powerful enough to make it a killer tool.
Have you used Project Builder on Mac OS X?  Its power isn't nearly so 
limited as you seem to think it is.  After all, you can create 
arbitrary shell script and AppleScript build phases for arbitrary 
phases of your build -- this puts it on par with makefiles when it 
comes to common use.
Using makefiles instead of a good IDE is like hard-coding an 
application's human interface instead of using Interface Builder or 
its equivalent.
(Though I can understand why people whose only exposure to such tools 
has been Microsoft Visual Studio might think otherwise, on both 
counts.  I don't know if that describes you, but I know it describes 
a lot of the knee-jerk anti-IDE sentiment seen in the Unix community.)
> There's a (slight) benefit in file management within a project, but if I'm
> editing my Makefiles with a text editor anyway, I'll already have a shell
> running.
There's a substantial benefit to many professional users, at least 
with the modern Project Builder, because it doesn't just do file 
management.  It does a lot of dependency tracking and management for 
you too -- and you don't have to do a bunch of work up front to set 
it up like you do with most makefile-based systems.
  -- Chris

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Chris Hanson, bDistributed.com, Inc.  |  Email: cmh@bDistributed.com
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