Re: Portable toolchain

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

On 11/26/13 20:37, Kevin Ingwersen wrote:
> Hello hello! ^^
>
> First, hey to everyone, I have just joined. I’m a Mac OS X user and my coding 
> usually lands in PHP, however, I really like C++ and also the concept of 
> ObjC++. And that brought me here.
>
> So, at school, we have coding class as well. But we only do Java and such - 
> because the teachers have the books for C, but they couldn’t find a portable 
> toolchain. So here at home, I installed GNUstep and everything else into a USB 
> drive. I will see if that will work tomorrow as well when I plug it into a 
> friend’s computer and see if appending the bin-paths will work.
What do you mean by a "portable" "toolchain"? a setup you can mount a 
computer and use? Or a way to compile from one computer for another target?

I suppose you are talking about windows from what you write below?

I have an external hard-drive. I defined it to mount to a scarcely used 
letter (e.g. H, G... lower letters are used by the system, higher 
letters by network drives usually). I used my personal computer to 
install there.

The installed system is now runnable everywhere, provided that you mount 
the drive in the same place, but you can control that on windows! So I 
can use this drive on my computer at work, at a friends, etc. Nothing 
inside the host system is needed.

I can compile and run programs, develop, etc.

I then made a script to "package" everything inside a big blob that is 
then position-independent to quickly package a specific application, 
without requiring to install the GS packages
Not space-efficient
> But what I had to do was, granting admin privileges…and we don’t have these at 
> school, obviously. Also one has to install three different .exe installers, 
> although it just makes up one system - why? Wouldn’t it be better if there was 
> one installer, so users wouldn’t mix up the paths during installation?
Well, it is not that hard to install separte exe's. You might need 
developer tools, you might not! You might only want the runtime...

> Another thing I need a portable version for is a project of mine called drag0n. 
> Its front end is a package manager which is soley based off PHP 5.5.3. But it 
> can do MUCH more. Another thing that was yet always annoying was to obtain 
> compilers. Especially with microsoft. I had to install about 10GB of junk just 
> to get told that I selected the wrong version, because I was falsely advertised 
> by Microsoft - horray!…not.
> So in that case, I would be re-distributing GNUstep, if it can be made 
> portable, alongside drag0n in order to supply a working toolchain.
You are citing a lot of stuff together... however, you can package an 
app in two ways:
1) make another "windows" installer, so a end-usercan isntall the window 
packages (runtime only, no developer tools) and your app and you can 
easily update the application separately
2) package everything in a self-contained blob.

> Besides. GNUstep is an awesome project! :)
Thanks. It is, nice that someone else recognizes it :) :)

Riccardo