Re: Solution for the scrolling bug?

[Gregory Casamento]

Tobias,

On Mon, Apr 6, 2015 at 10:23 AM, Tobias Braun
<gs.tobias@braun-abstatt.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was advised on the IRC channel (which unfortunately seems almost dead) to 
> post my question on the mailing list, so here we go:

No, its not dead.  The people in Europe who are on it are at work
still and so am I here in the US.  So it's likely not active because
people are busy.  I am currently logged into it as "bheron" and
"bheron_" if you want to ask any questions there please feel free.

> On my Arch Linux system, the most recent stable GNUstep version (installed 
> via pacman, the standard Arch package manager) exhibits a scrolling bug. 
> >From what I read by browsing the mailing list archives, I understand that 
> the stable version of GS is not compatible with recent Cairo versions. This 
> means I have to install a newer, unstable version of GS to get it to work.
>

That is, unfortunately, true since many distros don't keep up with our releases.

> Now I am not a regular Linux user, as I only set up this Arch Linux system in 
> order to get to know Linux better, so I need some general advice. I use OS X 
> as my main OS and know my way around the command line, but that's about it. I 
> don't really know how package management works on Linux systems and how it 
> interacts with stuff I'd install from source tarballs. So here are a few 
> questions that come to my mind:
>
> 1. Arch has a system called AUR for compiling packages from source. Should I 
> create AUR scripts for everything I install from source, or is this not 
> recommended/necessary?

This is not necessary.

> 2. It appears that the default compiler for Arch is gcc. Is it necessary or 
> recommended to use clang instead for GS?

The clang compiler supports more modern ObjC features than GCC does.

> 3. Should I install clang via pacman?

No, install the latest version of clang via source from their website @ llvm.org

> 4. Will installing clang interfere with the rest of the system? Will it 
> effectively replace gcc for everything I am going to compile by default? How 
> will build scripts know whether to use clang or gcc?
>

No.

> 5. How is GNUstep development organized? What branches are there apart from 
> the stable releases and where can I find them?
>

Most development in GNUstep happens on the trunk.

> 6. If anyone is wondering why I opted for Linux instead of e.g. FreeBSD: I 
> tried to install that first, but 10.1-STABLE wouldn't even load the kernel 
> image, it'd just freeze while trying to do so. 11.0-CURRENT would start the 
> actual init procedure, but after a few pages of text, it'd stop with a weird 
> error message which I don't remember right now. I guess there's not much I 
> can do about that, can I?

Nope... I'm not sure what this has to do with GS.  At any rate Linux
is perfectly fine.

> I know that's a lot of questions. I hope someone can help me get a clearer 
> picture of how these things work on Linux systems. At the moment, there's 
> just a lot of confusion in my head.
>
> Tobias

No worries, we are here to assist.

-- 
Gregory Casamento
GNUstep Lead Developer / OLC, Principal Consultant
http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
http://ind.ie/phoenix/