Re: Q's about GNUstep (-make & -base)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 11 Jun 2008, at 16:12, Michael Hopkins rm-this wrote:

> Hi all
>
> A couple of questions:
>
> 1) Can I use gnustep-make on Linux with colormake or clmake to  
> colourise the output during builds?  If so, how?  Have googled and  
> looked through the docs but I can find but no hints there.  I  
> suspect it would just be changing 'make' -> 'clmake' somewhere in  
> the bowels of the GNUstep directory hierarchy.  Also, how to I set  
> the default level of warnings (i.e. turn off those annoying  
> "warning: multi-line comment").

I'm afraid I don't know colormake and am not familiar with that  
warning, so I can't help on this one.

> 2) A more general question about code quality and portability of  
> gnustep-base.  I am just embarking on a project to port a bunch of  
> Obj-C/Cocoa code from Mac 10.5 to GNUstep on amd64 Linux (Debian/ 
> Ubuntu) and Win32 (with MSYS/MingW etc) using appropriate GNstep  
> makefiles.  No GUI, just using Foundation classes.
>
> Going very well so far, except for some classes differing between  
> Cocoa Foundation & gnustep-base (btw, is there a document listing  
> the differences anywhere?),

I don't think so ... but basically base is missing applescript support  
classes and many OSX10.5 features.  We want contributions to bring it  
from basically 10.4 compatibility to 10.5 compatibility.

> but I am wondering about things like:
>
> - is libgnustep-base (& libobjc) maintained now & into the future?   
> On both linux
>   and Win32?

Yes.

> - is it of an overall quality to be trusted for enterprise use

Yes... and has been used in the that context for several years.

> and if not where
>   are the glitches at the moment?
N/A

> - is it likely in the near future (or ever) that Objective-C 2.0  
> language support
>   will be provided?  Mainly interested in the syntax changes like  
> @properties,
>   @synthesize, fast enumeration (which I suspect gcc 4.3 will mainly  
> support)
>   rather than garbage collection which I am unlikely to use.

AFAIK, while some people have expressed an interest in part of it,  
nobody is working on that ... but I'm not sure.  i don't think many  
people like the syntax changes, so I guess we are more likely to see  
more popular/useful features (like non-fragile instance variables) in  
the near future.