Re: questions about GNUstep

[Richard Dale]

On Wednesday 21 November 2001 8:46 pm, e.sammer wrote:
> 2. The Makefiles package
>
> I was curious as to why the NeXT / Apple makefiles were kept the same.
> What I mean is with many projects using the GNU "autotools" (autoconf,
> automake, aclocal, m4, etc.) it would seems a viable option for the
> GNUstep build system. I am also aware that this is probably done to
> maintain makefile compatibility with NeXT, WO, and (older) MOSX Server
> projects, but providing a simple shell or perl conversion script might
> also do the trick. In theory, this is what is being done for nibs, so it
> wouldn't seem _too_ nutty to convert the makefiles as well. The main
> reason for this question is cleanliness of the build system. Not that
> the makefiles don't work, but having a set of m4 macros for the GNU
> autotools could greatly improve overall usability, as well as centralize
> configuration of a source tree. This would also allow easier integration
> into different Linux / Unix IDEs as many of them use these tools in the
> background. The autotools provide a standardized way of system arch
> detection, header testing, library testing, program existence, compiler
> sanity checks, and other flexible options that make them prime for this
> kind of development. Also, with many other projects using the
> "<appname>-config" style shell scripts to centralize the location of
> CFLAGS and linker args (see gtk, glib, imlib, xmms, libxml, etc.) it
> seems to be gaining much wider acceptance.

I've recently checked some Qt/KDE Objective-C bindings into the KDE cvs. The 
KDE project uses automake/autoconf, so he is my effort to make Objective-C 
work with them. The macro KDE_CHECK_GNUSTEP assumes that the enviroment 
variables in GNUstep.sh are present, and sets up an appropriate include and 
library path to pass to the configure script. I'm not a autoconf expert, and 
this is the best I could manage - any suggestions for improvements are very 
welcome. I've just searched on google for 'AC_PROG_OBJC', and can't find 
anything - surely someone has already implemented this?

-- Richard

AC_DEFUN(AC_PROG_OBJC,
AC_MSG_CHECKING(for an Objective-C compiler - not implemented yet)
)

dnl
dnl Check whether we support Objective-C
dnl
AC_DEFUN(KDE_CHECK_GNUSTEP,
[
AC_MSG_CHECKING(if objective-c enabled)
AC_ARG_ENABLE(objc,
[  --enable-objc    enable objective-c build],
[if test "$enableval" = yes; then
  enable_objc=yes
fi],
enable_objc=no)
AC_MSG_RESULT($enable_objc)

OBJCDIRS=
if test "$enable_objc" = "yes"; then
    AC_MSG_CHECKING(for gnustep system root)
    if test -z $GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT ; then
        GNUSTEPLIBDIR=
        GNUSTEPINCDIRS=
        AC_MSG_RESULT(not found)
    else
        AC_MSG_RESULT($GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT)
        AC_MSG_CHECKING(for gnustep-base library)
        GNUSTEPLIBDIR=`find $GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Libraries -name 
libgnustep-base.so | sed 's,libgnustep-base.so,,'|head -n 1`
        AC_MSG_RESULT($GNUSTEPLIBDIR)
        AC_MSG_CHECKING(for gnustep includes)
        GNUSTEPINCDIRS="-I$GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Headers \
                    -I$GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Headers/gnustep \
                        
-I$GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Headers/$GNUSTEP_HOST_CPU/$GNUSTEP_HOST_OS"
        AC_MSG_RESULT($GNUSTEPINCDIRS)
        OBJCDIRS="qtobjc kdeobjc"
        AC_PROG_OBJC
    fi
fi
AC_SUBST(OBJCDIRS)
AC_SUBST(GNUSTEPLIBDIR)
AC_SUBST(GNUSTEPINCDIRS)
])

KDE_CHECK_GNUSTEP

...and in the Makefile.am's:

OBJC = $(CXX)
OBJCFLAGS = $(CXXFLAGS) -fgnu-runtime -fconstant-string-class=NSConstantString