Re: Example of a framework?

[Nicola Pero]

> I'm new to GNUstep, so forgive me if I'm asking trivially simple 
> questions. Where might I find a reasonably concise example of how to set 
> up a makefile, etc. for a framework bundle? And once I have it, is it 
> possible to have it included in a RPM as part of a separate tool? Are 
> tools really bundled at all?
> 

> I'm in the midst of building a benchmarking framework for firewalls, and 
> most of the functionality is in two tools: fwbcontrol which is run by 
> the operator, and fwbworker which is spawned on all of the test hosts in 
> a cluster. I would like for these two tools to share a common framework, 
> yet they must be packaged (in RPMs) separately because they're installed 
> on different machines. Right now I build a fwbench-control package and 
> an fwbench-worker package. Ideally the common framework would get 
> included in each... However, I would settle for having a third 
> fwbench-common package if that simplifies things significantly.

Well - I suppose you basically have - 

 - a shared library (the proper core of your `framework')
 - two tools both of them using this same library.

the idea with RPMs is that they work the same way as you would use the
source code ...

so really have two options - 

 - either you build a framework containing both the library (as the 
   main framework object) and the two tools, and install the framework
   with both tools on all machines - that makes a single big RPM;

 - or you build a project containing three subprojects - a framework 
   (or perhaps simply a library if you don't need the special features
   of frameworks), and the two tools - if you build the RPM from the top
   level, all the subprojects get automatically included in the RPM;

 - or you have a separate framework project (/library) - which makes
   up a first RPM you install on both machines - and then you have the
   two tools as separate projects - which makes other two RPMs, which you
   can install separately.

Having the framework installed with each tool is not as clean, because if
you want to install both the tools, you end up with the framework
installed twice.

Building a framework using gnustep-make should be quite easy ... it's
basically the same as for a library, with some more options - you can know
about them by looking at the header of the framework.make makefile
included by gnustep-make.