Re: [RFC] Header organization of -base & -gui

[Adam Fedor]

On Thursday, July 3, 2003, at 08:13 AM, Nicola Pero wrote:
> I'm not sure how much a simplification would be to rename
>
>  *-gnu-gnu     into *-gnu
>  *-apple-apple into *-apple
>  *-fd-nil      into *-fd
>
> we loose some future flexibility (not clear if we'll need it though), 
> I'm
> not sure how much we gain.  Maybe it would be easier to understand for
> users.  I suppose someone might run X Windows on Apple, and be 
> interested
> in using apple-apple-gnu, maybe we don't want to rule out that
> possibility.
>
> But I'm definitely for keeping all the currently realistical and 
> available
> possibilities, which means not shrinking it down to just gnu / apple / 
> fd.

I'd rather simplify things as much as possible (mostly reducing the 
number of -I's), but I feel we should at least address the issue of 
multiple library combos. I only see two practical reasons why this 
would be necessary:

1) shared or networked disks that contains the GNUstep root directory
2) A developer who wants to develop and test their app for multiple 
combos.


Base/Foundation and GUI/AppKit are always installed in the System 
directory which isn't really meant to be shared, so perhaps (1) isn't a 
valid option. I think option (2) is useful. The reality now, though, is 
that GNUstep is already biased somewhat against developers - for 
instance the --enable-multi-platform option in GNUstep make is off by 
default, so you can't even install for multiple targets much less 
multiple combos without changing this. That's not bad, but it is 
confusing/ambiguous. Perhaps we should make this separation between 
User and Developer even more clear by consolidating these options:

--enable-multi-platform
--(dis)able-flattened

into something like:

--enable-developer (Actually I like --enable-multi-platform as a more 
encompassing option).


When this is enabled, you get mutli-platform/multi-combo support, plus 
GNUstep handles the case of the Foundation and AppKit headers installed 
in Headers/gnu-gnu-gnu (or whatever).