Re: Some general questions

[David Chisnall]

Hi Austin,


On 24 May 2011, at 21:21, Austin Clow wrote:

> 1) Products that use GNUstep libraries can still be sold?

Yes.  The only requirement is that you make it possible for end users to 
replace the copy of GNUstep that you ship with their own, and that you release 
any modifications that you make to GNUstep itself.

Shipping a binary that links to the GNUstep shared libraries is usually 
sufficient to satisfy these requirements.

> 2) The objlib2 runtime is the GNUstep runtime that incorporates the 'old 
> GNUstep' runtime with Étoilé's ObjectiveC2 extension. Which makes it 
> compatible with Apple's Runtime in specification only, but not 
> implementation. Ergo, they are not binary compatible. 
> 
>       Questions: What is the easiest way to compile a GNUstep program in 
> Xcode. Regardless of it being able to run on Mac OS X. (I want a GNUstep 
> binary produced). I don't want to use Make. Really what I am asking is what 
> is the procedure (in the terminal) to create a GNUstep binary in Mac OS X. 

There is no answer to this question, because there is no such thing as a 
GNUstep application.  There are Windows applications that use GNUstep, FreeBSD 
applications that use GNUstep, Linux  applications that use GNUstep, Solaris  
applications that use GNUstep, and so on.

You can (usually) compile an XCode project for one of these platforms by 
installing a GNUstep development environment and then running pbxbuild.

> 3) What are the acceptable locations for GNUstep frameworks to be stored? I 
> read the article about how frameworks are done a little differently in 
> GNUstep, but can frameworks still be placed in the .app/Frameworks/ 
> .app/Contents/Frameworks directory?

This will not work.  On OS X, this works because dyld understands 
@executable_path as a magic symbol location.  No other runtime loader that I'm 
aware of supports this.  

> 4) On the wiki page ObjC_FAQ it says "GNUstep has supported garbage 
> collection via the Boehm GC for some years. Efforts are underway to bring 
> this to closer compatibility with Apple's new implementation."
> 
>       Questions: How far along has the work come to make GNUstep have 
> Apple-eqsue Garbage Collection. My IDE relies on it heavily. 

I've been working on this for the past couple of days.  If you use the GNUstep 
runtime and compile with clang (both from trunk currently), then you should 
have Apple-compatible GC working with no effort.  At present, there is a bug 
somewhere in NSRunLoop that I am hunting for.  This should be sorted within the 
next couple of days.

I hope this helps,

David

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