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From: | Robert Slover |
Subject: | Re: Windows and GnuStep |
Date: | Thu, 02 Feb 2006 03:20:14 -0500 |
Hello Andy,I think your frustration may be rooted in a misunderstanding of the following quote from the "clarifications" citation:
Applications which use Foundation (AKA GNUstep-Base) exclusively are portable to nearly any posix compliant OS, as well as Windows (using Cygwin or MingW).
GNUstep, in keeping with OpenStep and MacOS X, distinguishes between "Applications" and "Tools". "Tools" are generally command-line apps and servers with no GUI. "Applications" use the application runloop and generally involve a GUI (and thus, link against GNUstep-gui as well as GNUstep-base). It is unfortunate in the quote above that the author chose to use the word "applications" in its more general sense. Substitute the word "projects" for "applications" in the citation above and the meaning becomes much more clear.
From reading the newsgroup, the current state of things appears to be that -make and -base work rather well on Windows, and -gui is getting there. Someone is shipping a product (beta, I think) with a GUI, but it uses only -base and uses native Windows libraries for the GUI (NovaMind, IIRC). I've seen screenshots of GNUstep GUI apps running on Windows, but don't know anything about how well they work.
I've no personal experience with the current state of GNUstep on Windows -- the newest version of Windows I have installed anywhere on my own hardware is 3.1a, just because it lives on another partition I've never been bothered with enough to wipe. (It also holds my Borland PASCAL and Paradox installations if I ever need them for anything -- not in the last 8 years -- so likelihood diminishing).
I've noticed a few guys are focusing on GNUstep on Windows support, and while I am sure many here appreciate their efforts, I suspect a significant portion of the community is not even in a position to help. I couldn't try the Windows installer even if I wanted to, and others will have Windows installed on a separate partition of their primary development machine, which is unlikely to be running Windows most of the time. Headway will be made more quickly when someone who really needs and/or wants GNUstep-gui to work well on Windows is able to pitch in and help -- those of us with mostly non-Windows programming backgrounds aren't going to be able to contribute in this area. Even bug reports (good ones) are more help than many of us can lend.
--Robert
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