Re: Best Linux distro for GNUstep?

[David Chisnall]

On 24 Mar 2011, at 15:51, Martin Dietze wrote:

> I don't know how the *BSD-guys do it, if 'portinstall gnustep'
> does all the stuff I'm talking about then this looks fairly
> attractive and probably means that they've got small upgrade
> cycles for packages and also an enthusiastic package maintainer
> who even has an eye at all the applications out there. 


FreeBSD lets you update third-party packages independently of the core OS.  
This seems much more sane than the approach of most Linux distributions, where 
they try to make third-party packages conform to the distribution's release 
cycle, but I suppose that's required since everything in a Linux distribution 
is a third-party package.  

Dirk Meyer does a really good job of keeping GNUstep ports (used to build 
packages on FreeBSD) up to date, so you can typically just update your 
installed packages and get the latest versions of stuff.

The gnustep port is a metaport, which just depends on a load of GNUstep stuff.  
When you run this command, it grabs the latest versions and compiles them.  You 
can add -P to grab the binary packages if you prefer, although this won't work 
for anything that's GPLv3 or has a license that prohibits binary distribution.  
Since the GNUstep tools are now GPLv3, we no longer have pre-built binaries for 
FreeBSD, so you need to build from ports.

David

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