Re: Cross Compiling for OS X?

[Andreas Höschler]

Hi all,

> Improving GNUstep Make to build native OS X applications (it already  
> works nicely for frameworks) would be a better approach, but I'm not  
> sure how much effort this would be.  Building OS X apps from a  
> makefile isn't very hard, although fat binaries are slightly harder,  
> so it might be worth investigating.


I would be pretty much interested in a gnustep make makefile that  
generates an OSX application bundle. However, for now the "Add new  
files to XCode and GNUmakefile approach" works well enough for me. I  
am just through the process of figuring out how to setup XCode to  
build frameworks and applications like I am used to from  
ProjectBuilder. If anybody is struggling with the same problem, read on:

Problem: Source code for a bunch of frameworks and a bunch of  
applications and tools requiring these frameworks. The makefiles have  
been created with ProjectBuilderWO.app. There was a tool that  
generated gnustep makefiles from the PB.project files. The sources are  
lying on an NFS server so they can be reached from MacOSX and Solaris.  
On both platforms the frameworks, bundles and tools are built with

        cd  <project dir>
        make install

using gnustep make. Applications had to be built with  
ProjectBuilderWO.app on MacOSX since the app bundle generated by  
gnustep make did not work correctly on MacOSX.  This setup (worked  
well for years) was to be migrated from MacOSX 10.2 with  
ProjectBuilderWO.app to 10.5 with XCode. XCode has dozens of settings,  
some with non-obvious meanings at the first glance. Many defaults need  
to be tweaked to get frameworks installed in /Library/Frameworks and  
applications installed in /Applications. Here's what I did.

I first created an XCode project (Cocoa framework or Cocoa application  
for each of my projects in a temporary directory and copied the  
generated files into the real project directories. After opening the  
XCode project, adding the files (classes, resources, frameworks) was  
simple. The tricky part was to open the "Get Info" panel for the  
project and the target - this really has to be done in both places -  
and do the following settings for a framework project:

Deployment Location                                     checked
Installation Build Products Location            /
Installation Directory                                  /Library/Frameworks
Strip Linked Product                                    not checked

This installs the frameworks in /Library/Frameworks where I usually  
expect them to be, not in /Build/Release/Frameworks, /home/ahoesch/ 
Library/Frameworks,... I don't know whether all of these settings are  
required, but it works for me this way.

By the way, I found Parallels to be an extremely useful product  
(MacOSX application) for GNUsteppers. It allowed me to install Solaris  
10 x86 (and thus GNUstep) in a virtual machine on my PowerBook, so I  
can carry around a full featured MacOSX/GNUstep development  
environment with me now. The performance is pretty convincing.

Regards,

  Andreas