Re: Windows and GnuStep

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 5 Feb 2006, at 05:34, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> In the short term, may I advise you try building GNUstep using Cygwin.

<snip>

> 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.

Would it be possible for you to post the procedure for doing this so  
that others can try using cygwin (or better still, patches so that a  
build on cygwin will work out-fo-the-box)?
I ask because none of the gnustep developers has been using cygwin as  
far as I know, and I've seen several reports saying it won't build.

The pure windows (mingw32) version on the other hand builds from svn  
readily simply by following the procedure in the README.MinGW in the  
gnustep-back package.

> BTW, the
> GNUstep.conf file path seems to be hardcoded into gnustep-make,  
> that it
> keeps going to /c/GNUstep/GNUstep.conf-dev.

It's a configurable option ('configure --help' for details)

> 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).

Strange ... works for me with mingw32 ... perhaps a cygwin specific  
problem?

> 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.

I believe the windows installer does that (though with a ready built  
GNUstep too).  My understanding is that it's supposed to give you the  
whole environment, then you can update the source and rebuild  
whate3ver version you want.

> 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.

Yes, while locating things is trivial (the README.MinGW tells you  
where to get everything), downloading/installing the dependencies  
slow/tedious, especially when the sites concerned are overloaded/down.