Re: Windows and GnuStep

[Christopher Armstrong]

I've been reading some of this discussion regarding GNUstep and Windows.
In the past, I have used GNUstep on Windows, both under Cygwin and
Mingw, and I've had my fair share of the build problems that exist.

In the short term, may I advise you try building GNUstep using Cygwin.
You may/may not be able to get more programs working under this, even
though it has greater overhead. I've often found it cleaner when
experimenting with GNUstep and building applications, esp. those with
Unix specific customisations, which IMHO, is one significant impediment
introduced by developers. It should be (at least a little) easier to get
applications to compile first time. One major hint: force the backend to
compile against win32/winlib (the "server" and "graphics" command line
option respectively) if you have an Xserver in Cygwin.

I know how difficult it is to get GNUstep SVN building from source and
actually getting something to run, let alone develop for it. Having left
GNUstep for a couple of months, I decided to try and get an environment
up and running from scratch again recently. 3 hours and some command
line options to ./configure later, I had gnustep-back compiled. BTW, the
GNUstep.conf file path seems to be hardcoded into gnustep-make, that it
keeps going to /c/GNUstep/GNUstep.conf-dev, even though I was trying to
install to /h/Dev/GNustep (I was using SVN as of 2 days ago). anyway,
this is just one example of the many issues just getting this beast to
compile on Windows. Most developers don't use Windows because they can't
stand it. I can't blame them, but IMHO, if we're to have portability to
Windows some developers are actually going to have to use it.

On yet another side note, despite having built GNUstep for me in the
past, it would appear Gorm has regressed (it can't find it's bundles,
even though the bloody things are in Gorm.app/Resources).  I might try
CVS/SVN when I reboot. So I can definetely empathise with how painful it
is getting GNUstep to work on Windows.

If I may make a suggestion to the community, it would be providing a
pre-built Mingw/Msys environment with all the ffcall and
tiff/jpeg/png/iconv/libintl/libobjc/etc binaries already inserted into
it (without GNUstep compiled), so that developers can get started
building GNUstep straight away. This might help save about 2 of the 3
hours usually required before actually building GNUstep on Windows that
is spent finding and installing all these little files. Most of these
packages are updated once in a blue moon, so such a thing should need to
be updated often. Actually, I separated such files from my install
recently so that they could be easily zipped and redistributed, so I
might provide some information in a later posting with regards to this.

Finally, a recommendation to all developers of third-party programs,
frameworks, libraries and bundles: please at least try to compile your
program once under Windows. Build procedures rarely change, and if
tested at least once, some people might be able to use your
application/library under Windows, esp if they're willing to use Mingw.

Sorry to rant, and I hope I haven't treaded on to many toes.

Cheers
Chris
carmstrong at fastmail dot com dot au