Re: BTW

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-07-14 01:00:55 +0100 Lloyd Dupont <lloyd@nova-mind.com> wrote:

> > > I could see there is an update of the libraries (base is now 1.10.3 & GUI 
> > > is now 0.9.5) but the windows installer hasen't been updated.
> > >
> > > what could I do about that?
> >
> > I don't know ... perhaps contact the people who provided the installer 
> > directly.  Perhaps you could update the installer and provide a newer 
> > version?
> uh... I have no idea how the installer is made...

Me neither ... you would need to look at its documentation and maybe contact 
the authors.

> > > Tomorrow I might try the following: download the sources, update my 
> > > installation compiled from source, (try to update to latest GCC as well), 
> > > recompile. would it be ok?
> >
> > Well ... I don't know about the 'latest' GCC ... but if you use the latest 
> > GNUstep code from CVS, and follow the instructions for MinGW in the 
> > GNUstep-make package exactly (ie use the same versions of 
> > mingw,msys,gcc,libraries), you should end up with a working system.  I 
> > know 
> > Nicola has done that in the last couple of days, and I updated from CVS 
> > not 
> > long ago and ended up with a working system, so those instructions work 
> > (at 
> > least on windows-xp).
>
> uh... some reading on the web made me warry about grabbing the latest CVS 
> stuff.
> for example a web reviewer was commenting about the (past?) instability of 
> some GNUstep
> code and Adam Fedor replyed, "of course, he uses CVS instead of the 
> released 
> packages",
> so you see....

Well ... it's a relative thing ... of course the CVS version is unstable in 
the sense that it's continually changing as features get added and modified, 
but the vast majority of the time it works fine, and the vast majority of 
the time it is as stable or more stable (in the sense of what can crash it) 
than the latest release, since it has the latest bugfixes in it as well as 
new features.

In any case, if your current code is crashing, what do you have to lose by 
trying the latest?
I would recommend keeping one copy of the system for production use, and one 
copy updated to the latest code from CVS.  Whenever your CVS version works 
well for you, use it as a new snapshot for production code.

> Beside I've tryed in some remote time (back in... 2001/2? when I was still 
> interested in home C coding)
> to do just that (exactly follow instruction for MinGW): unsuccesffully.....

Well, the MinGW stuff has changed a lot since then, it's improved and the 
instructions are now simpler.
The old instructions *did* work, but were complex enough that it was easy to 
make a mistake.

> > Maybe ... you need to look at the changes to find out.  Simpler, if there 
> > are a *lot* of changes you are interested in, might be just to update to 
> > latest CVS version and try it.
> > Where do you think this memory corruption is?  I think the base library is
>
> I have not clearly pointed it out yet.
> The fact is: in some circumstances, just calling 
> 'LoadLibrary("gnustep-base.dll")'
> will crash the process. so it's hard to diagnose.

Then you *NEED* to run under debug and step through the loading process to 
find out where it is going wrong, and you need to do that with the latest 
code from CVS in order to be sure that any discovery you make can be fed 
back into CVS code... Since we need some developer to mbe able to duplicate 
your experiend in order to make a fix (or apply and test any patch you can 
come up with).  We don't have the manpower to back-patch earlier releases of 
GNUsteps ... fixes only go into the CVS head.