Re: FOSDEM Aftermath - the Hotel / Notes from preparing and giving my talk

[Nicola Pero]

> - manual GNUstep installation from source is still not a no-brainer.  
> Incomprehensible for a newbee with no idea about the concepts and  
> structures of GNUstep (for instance the different domains). Despite  
> I already did this some time ago I still had to think somewhat hard  
> about certain details and read the several INSTALL files over and  
> over again. You need to know quite a lot about GNUstep internals to  
> understand what you're doing and what to do if something doesn't  
> work. Luckily I also archive the discuss-gnustep and gnustep-dev  
> lists and could look up things I vaguely remembered (mostly file  
> system layout stuff). Also, Dennis Leeuw's build guide was of great  
> help for me.
>
> I then finally decided to do a install into the System domain to  
> replace what came with Ubuntu (but retain the somewhat good  
> integration into the 'Applications' menu of Gnome)

I think this is the reason you got into trouble - you had already an  
installation of GNUstep on your machine - from your distribution -,  
and were trying
to overwrite it with a new installation - from source.  That is  
reasonably easy once you know how things work "internally" (filesystem  
layouts etc),
but it could definitely be confusing if it's your first installation ;-)


> - I found no way how I would determine what Frameworks/Libraries are  
> required for a given gnustep-make based project/application (since  
> there's no configure phase) and whether those are already installed.

That is a good point.  We could do better in this area.  Btw, I think  
the lack of a ./configure stage is good, the problem is the lack of  
feedback
on what libraries or packages you need. ;-)


> - the need to have GNUstep.sh sourced to make gnustep-make work  
> breaks sudo (despite having the sourcing of GNUstep.sh in my system- 
> wide /etc/bash.bashrc). I used 'sudo su -' as a workaround but found  
> that rather hackish. Maybe I missed something here

The standard and easy way to get this working under GNU/Linux is to add

 . /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

to your /etc/profile.

Then, any time any user logs in, GNUstep.sh gets sourced.  That  
includes root when you temporarily switch to root and you don't have
to know too much about sudo flags or options. ;-)

I strongly recommend doing it that way - and recommending to all new  
users that they do it that way - because it "just works". :-)

Thanks