Re: What would be the most complete GNUStep system?

[David Chisnall]

On 27 Oct 2014, at 21:04, Asiga Nael <asiganael@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Btw, nobody suggested Darwin. It's open-source,

Well, kind of.  The audio subsystem, for example, is proprietary, so if you 
want to have working sound then you're going to need to write a load of kernel 
code.  I'm also not sure if anyone's ported DRM, so if you want to have working 
3D drivers with X.org on Darwin you'll need a fair bit of work there.

Or you could just use FreeBSD.

> and AFAIK it supports fat binaries natively (I don't think fat binaries are 
> an OSX addition, they must be in Darwin already).

Fat binaries are not that hard to support.  Mach-O has a well-specified way of 
supporting them, but there's a proposal for adding them to ELF.  You need a 
little bit of support in the kernel's image activator and a bit in the runtime 
linker (for shared library fat binaries), but not very much.

> Maybe it can even mount DMGs natively (I don't know if DMG are a Darwin or an 
> OSX thing).

What is it about DMGs that you actually want?  Disk images are not hard to 
support and the bundle format on OS X is only required to work around 
limitations in the filesystem.  With ZFS, it just looks like an ugly hack.

> Regarding app bundles, that's a desktop thing, not an OS thing, so that can 
> be done from GNUstep.

Well, kind of.  To really do it properly, you also want framework bundles, and 
that requires some rtld patching to allow looking for libraries in the correct 
place (not just lib/*.so, but following the symlinks inside the framework 
bundles).  GNUstep implements framework bundles in a fairly hacky way.

> So, I tend to believe Darwin with GNUstep would have every feature I wish to 
> have in my everyday OS.

Unless you want your everyday OS to have accelerated video or working audio.  
Or WiFi...

David

-- Sent from my Apple II