Re: GNUstep on Ubuntu Hardy and Debian Testing.

[David Chisnall]

Hi Rubens

On 30 Apr 2008, at 12:22, Rubens_Septimus wrote:

> So, according to the first way - for newbies like me - my question  
> might be
> : is the Camaelon theme engine specific to Etoile or is it well  
> integrated
> within GNUstep specs so I can use it, without the need to install  
> from svn ?
> I think some clarification about this for people like me could help  
> more my
> understanding of things.

Camaelon is a set of categories on GNUstep classes and is highly  
dependent on the layout of a number of classes in AppKit.  As such, a  
version of Camaelon needs to be paired with the version of GNUstep.   
The version in Étoilé trunk should work with GNUstep trunk.  We should  
probably start tagging versions of Camaelon that work with specific  
GNUstep releases, but haven't done that in the past.  Nicolas' Summer  
of Code student this year is working on improving theme support in  
GNUstep and so the ABI dependencies of Camaelon on GNUstep are likely  
to be reduced in the future (and, hopefully, the AppKit ABI will be  
stabilised soon...).

With regard to installing from debs, Étoilé does not produce packages  
for any operating system at present, although we are more than happy  
to assist anyone wishing to do so.  If you want to create debs from  
our repository then drop us an email and we'll be happy to provide any  
help you need.

Camaelon has no dependencies on any parts of Étoilé.  If you want to  
use horizontal menus, then you have two choices, you can either use  
the support built into GNUstep by writing the default, or you can run  
EtoileMenuServer and load the corresponding bundle from the Étoilé  
repository in the same way you load Camaelon (via user AppKit  
bundles).  These both work in slightly different ways.  At some point  
it is probably worth comparing the code in the two and seeing if they  
can be merged - as I recall the only real difference is that the  
Étoilé version gets the location for the menu bar by querying the menu  
server, and so it should be possible to use the same code in both  
cases and use the default positioning when the menu server is not  
running.

David