building a self-contained deployable gnustep

[Julian Mayer]

hello all

i recently started porting a Mac OS X game to linux via gnustep, you may have 
seen the flood of bugreports. thanks for the fixes so far!

while i am waiting for some showstopper bugs which are too complicated for me 
to fix myself (mainly #34492 and #34481) i thought i would move forward in 
other direction.

the problem i am facing is that i want to create a binary-only deployable 
package (more of a .tgz'ed folder - akin to sauerbraten) that linux users 
regardless of distribution can download and run without having to install 
dependencies, namely GNUstep. 
(since my app requires svn gnustep, recent clang, recent libobjc2, and some 
unmerged gnustep fixes, i.e. #34490 it won't run on what distributions ship for 
a few years anyway)

for the non-gnustep libraries i figured this would not be too hard to do. just 
build dependencies on a distribution with an old glibc, and either link 
statically (if license permits) or shared and adjust the LD load path to be 
inside my folder (ADDITIONAL_LDFLAGS = -Wl,--rpath='$$ORIGIN/').

the remaining problem is, i do not know how to build and package gnustep in a 
way so it is loaded from my app-folder wherever it resides. it seems to expect 
being in a global location.

the only resources i could find on this topic are
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Deployment_on_Windows
which applies to windows only - i'd need the same thing for linux.

there is also the "GNUstep Deployment Environment" on the "GNUstep wish list" 
in the wiki - which sounds what i need, but it being a wishlist-item is 
discouraging.

so, does anyone know how to:
• build gnustep in a way so it can operate from a location relative to my 
binary so i can deploy it?
• how to handle the dependencies of gnustep itself - so that the whole thing 
runs on an as-large-as-possible pool of distributions:
  • i guess libtiff and libpng and possibly libxml2 can be statically linked 
but what about libffi, libxt, libXft, freetype2 and libart?


for additional complication i absolutely need the embedded gnustep to use 
either the gnome-theme (which probably is a deploy-dependency nightmare) or a 
(good looking theme && get rid of the weird separate-window-horizontal-menu) so 
that my future users don't turn away laughing or even crying.

thanks for any help, julian

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