Re: questions about GNUstep

[Nicola Pero]

Trying to answer the questions I feel more relevant.


> 1. Installation of Base, GUI, and Makefiles
> 
> My first question is why are the Makefiles, GUI, and Foundation
> distributed separately? 

Nothing prevents linux/unix distributions or people from distributing them
together ... :-)

The only distribution the gnustep maintainers do is making a tarball of
each of them ... :-)

They are conceptually separated packages providing separated functionality
... you might want gnustep-make but not the other ones, or gnustep-make
and gnustep-base but not gnustep-gui, or you might want all of them.

The dependencies tree is linear, *very* easy, trivial:

gnustep-make
 |
 |
gnustep-base
 |
 |
gnustep-gui, gnustep-xgps

and that's it.


> but I couldn't figure out why someone would install only one or two 
> of these packages.

Companies have important non-gui software (servers) ... gnustep-base is
definitely *great* for non-gui applications ... probably the best free
non-gui development environment around ... so there certainly are
companies needing only non-gui software.  I talk about companies because
for some reasons people seem to be mostly attracted by gui stuff ... but
people might want it as well if they develop non-gui apps.


> 2. The Makefiles package
> 
> I was curious as to why the NeXT / Apple makefiles were kept the same.
> What I mean is with many projects using the GNU "autotools" (autoconf,
> automake, aclocal, m4, etc.) it would seems a viable option for the
> GNUstep build system. 

My answer is - the makefile system was kept the same not for compatibility
(it's not really compatible) but because ... because it's a great system.

the gnustep-make package depends on autoconf to get the configuration when
you install it.  gnustep-base and gnustep-gui use autoconf to get some
bits of configuration they need.

but once gnustep-make, gnustep-base and gnustep-gui have been configured
and installed, all the configuration needed to develop gnustep GUI
applications on a certain platform is stored in the gnustep-make system
... so there is no need at all to run autoconf's configures again when you
want to build an application ...

gnustep-make is 

 * extremely simple to use - fast to learn and to use;

 * fast - you don't need to run configure scripts;

 * your makefiles are totally platform independent.  you write them once,
   and compile them (without needing to run configure) on any machine
   where gnustep has been configured and installed.

you can write in less than one minute a fast totally portable set of
makefiles for a complex application ... writing gnustep makefiles is so
easy that you can have an automated system write and manage them ...
ProjectCenter :-)

If you need to customize stuff, you can still use autoconf together with
gnustep-make ... nothing prevents you ... generally you need to do this
when you want to mix gnustep with third party code ...

in general, I think gnustep-make gives us a lot of power ... developing
with gnustep-make is much faster than developing using automake, autoconf
etc.

it's a very mature system too.


> 4. Arch Dependant Directories

you can configure gnustep-make to build without these ... 

./configure --enable-flattened

that gives you a clean flattened tree.  I like the flattened tree but
never use it :-)


> 6. Dev Environment
> 
> Project Center and Gorm have made leaps and bounds and are great apps.
> My question is regarding why they aren't part of the actual GNUstep
> project.

They are part of the GNUstep project.


> 7. Integration
> 
> One of the best things about some of the newer apps for MOSX is the IPC
> functionality between related apps. One of the things that I've always
> been curious about is why this isn't taken advantage of at the window
> manager level. Of course, WindowMaker, which I understand to be the
> officially-unofficial window manager of GNUstep, isn't written in ObjC
> which makes such a task difficult, but I imagine with a little
> creativity (aka language bindings) this could be possible.

I don't think it makes much of a difference the fact that window maker is
written in C.  I personally think it's great software and well ... some
great software is written in C ... not a problem.  The important thing is
it interfaces well with gnustep ... it doesn't really need to be written
in Objective-C to do this.