install hell

[Travis Griggs]

I know others have mentioned this before. Installing GNUstep components is a 
real pain. I just use GNUstep-make and GNUstep-base, and I'm amazed how coupled 
and fragile they are. I get the 1.6.0 tarballs and install. I use 
--prefix=/usr/local/GNUstep. With GNUstep-make, I also use the 
--enable-flattened (sure do wish this was the default). I found that while I 
need to be root to do the make install for both, if I'm root for any of the 
other steps, it doesn't work. I found that if I tried to even make alternative 
versions of base, things blew up. Obviously, I had to source the common shell 
environment script which adds bazillion environment vars to get base to build, 
_but_ if I tuned any of the vars (such as TOOL_INSTALL_DIR), things broke 
downstream in weird ways. So the process in the end turned out to be something 
like (maybe someone else will find it useful):

tar -xvzf gsmaketarfile
cd gnustep-make
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/GNUstep --enable-flattened
make
su -c "make install"
cd ..
rm -rf gnustep-make

add the source /usr/local/GNUstep/System/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh to my 
.bash_profile and relogin

tar -xvzf gsbasetarfile
cd gnustep-base
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/GNUstep (I found that if I accidently included 
a -enable-flattened here... things broke)
make
su -c "make install"
cd ..
rm -rf gnustep-base

add lines such as:

export GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR=$GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT
export TOOL_INSTALL_DIR=~/bin

to my .bash_profile and relogin again

And to top it all off, while I can build apps, I can't run them at any terminals from within KDE. I get a 
travis@sumfin:~$ ExampleSetTest 
ExampleSetTest: error while loading shared libraries: libGSUnit.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

The weird thing... if I flip to a console, it works fine! Looking at it more, 
it appears that any terminal window under KDE has the GNUSTEP vars set, but 
LD_LIBRARY_PATH cleared, if I source the GNUstep.sh, it gets set fine. Why 
can't GNUstep just put libraries where the rest of the system puts them?

--
Travis Griggs
Key Technology
One Man's Pink Plane is Another Man's Blue Plane