RE: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to gstep, aga in on Win NT?

[Mike Llewellyn]

Many thanks for the pointers.

On another issue, would be v. interested in your view;

My situation is this;
We are selling a system that includes custom hardware and supporting software. Part of the software is written in ObjC (WO 4.01, NT), and at the moment we are obliged to buy a full WO Developer license from Apple each time we sell to a customer.

As you can imagine this is less than ideal.

I have a limited block of time to rewrite the software such that we do not have to pay any license fee. I have a number of options, including MS C++, some kind of Java, perhaps MS .NET, and of course one of libFoundation, gstep-base, or even the Darwin Foundation-type libraries.

My natural preference would be an Objective-C based solution, since that is my main programming background and because it still seems to be a superior language. It should, in theory, also be the simplest and most rapid solution.

However, reading through the GPL I'm not convinced that it does suit my situation to use gstep, since I am not in a position to be able to publish source code to the software, as it appears the license will require me to do.

Also, MS C++ has most of the other libraries I will need (property lists, ODBC), and I will be able to distribute freely once I have written the program. Java whilst more preferable as a language doesn't seem to have a propertylist library, adding an extra piece of work.

The choice I have then seems to be limited to an attempt to port using the apparently completely free libFoundation, or rewriting from scratch using C++.

Since libFoundation probably still has bugs for Windows, and probably isn't going to be updated, and I would need to distribute at least parts of Cygwin (or an equivalent) with it, it is looking as though MS VC++ is the best choice.

Thanks for your time,
---
Mike Llewellyn, Nexan Ltd, (+44) (0)1223 713 517

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richard Frith-Macdonald [mailto:richard@brainstorm.co.uk]
> Sent: Friday, April 26, 2002 11:10 AM
> To: Mike Llewellyn
> Cc: 'discuss-gnustep@gnu.org'
> Subject: Re: Experience of porting a WO 4.01 NT cmd-line program to
> gstep, aga in on Win NT?
>
>
>
> On Friday, April 26, 2002, at 10:42 AM, Mike Llewellyn wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > Thanks for the info.
> >
> > Do you (or anybody else?) know where I might find top-level
> > documentation that might aid me in establishing a development
> > environment for gstep-base on a Win platform?
>
> There isn't anything much ... I'd call this alpha or beta
> software under
> windows - it works, but it's
> far from polished, and there are bound to be some bugs left.
> The file README.mingw in the Documentation subdirectory of the make
> package is about all there is,
> and this file is a few weeks out of date as I haven't found
> time to do a
> re-install from scratch
> and update it recently.
>
> > Apologies for my ignorance, it has been years since using
> NeXTSTEP, and
> > I have become M$-ised over the last few years.
> >
> > Is it just a case of putting the root folder of the gstep-base tree
> > into a default search path, add the gstep-make files
> likewise, and take
> > it from there?
>
> Not that easy I'm afraid.  You should read the file I
> mentioned above,
> and take it from there.
> There are no binariy packages available ... you have to build from
> source.
>
> > I have not noticed the file gdomap that you mention anywhere yet,
> > perhaps I need a package of binaries to be able to run correctly?
>
> gdomap is in the Tools subdirectory of the base package.
>
> > Do I need Cygwin to be able to use gstep?
>
> Not necessarily, but you do need some unix-like environment - at the
> moment your choices are MSYS and Cygwin.
> I mostly use MSYS, and the documentation reflects that.  I
> think MSYS is
> a bit simpler to use than Cygwin,
> but you can find a larger variety of other packages to run
> under cygwin
> (I run CVS from cygwin).
>