Re: gnustep-make experiment

[David Ayers]

Nicola Pero schrieb:
> I like the idea of your patch, so I rewrote the shell script and committed it.
> 

Minor nit... isn't gnustep-config.sh meant to be executed, not sourced?
 So shouldn't it be named gnustep-config instead of gnustep.config.sh?

I'm trying to follow this discussion but it seems that we are not
addressing the issues which /I/ thought we are trying to solve.

I thought the main point was to enable ./configure to test for the
existence/usability of GNUstep libraries/frameworks.  So shouldn't it be
installed in into a standard system path instead of
GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Tools?  I would expect /usr/local/bin or whatever
--bindir is set to for configure of -make.

So how does is help with writing configure scripts?
Maybe something like?

GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES=${GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES:=`gnustep-config GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES`}
if test -z "$GNUSTEP_PATHLIST"; then
   . ${GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES}/GNUstep.sh
fi

And then, once all the variables are set, how should we write configure
script tests?  (and which variables are we allowed to use?)

Should we
1) tweak the environment to allow AC_CHECK_LIB to work?
2) create our own:
- AC_CHECK_GNUSTEP_LIBRARY
- AC_CHECK_GNUSTEP_FRAMWORK
- AC_CHECK_GNUSTEP_NATIVELIBRARY
macros to be included in configure.ac scripts via GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES?
3) invoke 'make' with gnustep makefiles in some config subdirectory
during ./configure
4) other ideas which I may have missed?

Note that I haven't really understood how pkg-config would be used at
this level either.  But I get the feeling that we are not solving the
issues we are aiming at.  But maybe I'm just confused, so I guess it
would be great if the usage of the two approaches in the context of
configure scripts could be summarized.

Cheers,
David