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

[David Chisnall]

On 21 Feb 2009, at 13:15, Nicola Pero wrote:

> > - 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. ;-)

This is one area where we could really help packagers out.  Currently,  
we have a lot of GNUmakefiles with lines manually invoking pkg- 
config.  It would be really nice if:

- GNUstep-make automatically generated .pc files.
- GNUstep-make had a way of specifying a list of dependencies (or,  
ideally, a plist or similar containing the minimum and, optionally  
maximum, supported versions).

This should automatically get the required flags for the compiler and  
linker, and should ideally be easily parsable by third-party tools so  
that packages can translate it into whatever form they need.

Currently we put this information in the README file, which is  
entirely the wrong place for it.

> > - 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". :-)

I believe that a number of Linux distributions now include something  
like this in /etc/profile:

for I in /etc/profile.d/*
do
        source $I
done

On these systems, it would be nice to install (or symlink) GNUstep.sh  
in /etc/profile.d.

David