GNUstep on 10.7

[artware]

Hi all,

I'm tearing my hair out here... I've been working for 14 hours
straight trying to get GNUstep-base installed on FreeBSD and Mac OS X
10.7 / Lion. I've made literally zero progress. I'm only trying to
install gnustep-make and gnustep-base. I don't need any of the GUI
stuff.

Obviously the Mac Ports option is a no-go, as old and neglected. And
the port is not working on FreeBSD for me either. So I'm having to do
it straight from source.

I think I have all the prereqs installed, including libffi and libobjc
for good measure. On the Mac, I spent a good amount of time getting a
separate FSF gcc installed. Actually gnustep-make seems to have
installed fine on both machines.

I sourced the GNUstep.sh file, I'm seeing the right environmental
variables, but when I go to ./configure, it bails out, saying
"checking FFI library usage... none. You do not have either ffcall or
libffi installed/enabled, or configure needs --with-ffi-include and/or
--with-ffi-library flags so GNUstep can find them,"

I'm specifying my ffi location in the configure arguments, but it
doesn't seem to take. I've tried every variation I can think of. All
of my Googling only brings up other people having the same problem,
not any solutions.

In my mind, it raises a few eyebrows that GNUstep's configure script
(or InstallGNUStep script) can't find a library it depends on so
heavily. I thought about switching to ffcall, but that library seems
deprecated if not abandoned.

If anyone can share their tips on how to get GNUstep to build on any
platform, there are really no words for how grateful I would be.

Thanks,

Ben