Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[David Chisnall]

On 30 Oct 2008, at 14:10, Nicolas Roard wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:56 PM, Truls Becken  
> <truls.becken@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Nicola Pero wrote:
> > > Anyway, I agree that for an Xcode programmer the idea of just  
> > > having a
> > > button in Xcode that cross-compiles to Windows might be attractive.
> > > I also agree with you that it would be nice for GNUstep to support  
> > > that. :-)
> >
> > Even more awesome, was your idea of a button in Xcode that sends the
> > code changes to the virtual machine, and triggers a recompile there.
> > This would be easiest to implement as a network protocol, so sending
> > it to a physical computer shouldn't make any difference. Perhaps  
> > using
> > distributed objects?
>
> It's definitely something you could do -- have a special script in
> xcode triggered when you use a "windows" target, with the script
> basically calling (lots of different possible ways to do this) the
> gnustep installation in the VM to recompile the program.
> Frankly I think it's a better approach than doing the
> cross-compilation, specially considering installing GNUstep on windows
> is just a matter of running the installer.

This is pretty much what I did when I was developing on OS X and  
deploying on IRIX, but I just had a trivial shell script that ran  
rsync and then ssh'd to the target machine and ran make. Using a  
network share is another option.  Most desktop VMs have the ability to  
export a host folder via SMB or similar to the guest.  Even better  
would to have some kind of file changed notification system on the  
guest used to automatically recompile when files in the share were  
changed, so it would always be up to date.

> > The biggest challenge probably is syncing the code changes. If
> > commiting to a repository for every cycle is acceptable, it would be
> > easily solved that way.
>
> A network drive might be doable (i.e. create a network drive on osx
> and put your sources here, so they can be accessed both by xcode and
> by the vm).
>
> The only last hurdle is the GNUmakefile generation -- there is no
> xcode->gnumakefile translator anywhere ? surely it can't be that hard
> to do -- iirc the xcode stuff is in xml.

I take it you've never looked at the XCode project files in a text  
editor.  They're graphs wrapped in XML, with opaque references  
everywhere, and so difficult to parse that I've had XCode fail on them  
a few times, and had to recreate them from scratch.  XCode does expose  
most of its model via the scripting interface, however, so it would  
probably be possible to write an AppleScript that would create a  
GNUmakefile from the active project.

David