Re: GNUstep appearance and help porting Cocoa

[Fred Kiefer]

Anurodh Pokharel wrote:
> And one other thing, is there any quick way of porting from Cocoa to
> Gnustep. I have looked at the GnuStep page, but other than mentioning
> tools, it is light on details.  I have an NNTP newsreader i've written called
> OSXnews  (http://osxnews.sf.net) that I'd like to port over. If anyone
> has ported stuff a few pointers would be helpful. Is there a howto
> anywhere?

Porting from to Cocoa to GNUstep has different aspects.
First there is the compatibility of the basic Foundation Kit and 
Application Kit We support a lot of classes, but not all of them and the 
same is true for specific methods, Specifically newly introduced classes 
and methods may still be missing as GNUstep started out aiming at 
OpenStep compatability.
Second you have all the additional frameworks and libraries programmers 
on MacOSX take for granted, for some of them free replacements exisits, 
for most they are still missing.
For the porting itself you need to write a new GNUstep make file for the 
project (very easy, still there is currently no automatic way to do so) 
and you need to convert the NIB files to GNUstep format. At some point 
in time GORM will be able to read NIB files, but currently you need to 
use the gmodel intermediate format for this and for this the above 
mentioned tools are used.

What else do you expect from a porting howto? It is as easy as this: 
Don't use anything we do not provide, write a makefile, convert your NIB 
files to gmodel. Ah yes, I did forget about the Info.plist. You will 
need to provide this file as well.

Fred