Re: building a self-contained deployable gnustep

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Oct 2011, at 11:53, Julian Mayer wrote:

>> 
>>> 
>>> the remaining problem is, i do not know how to build and package gnustep in 
>>> a way so it is loaded from my app-folder wherever it resides. it seems to 
>>> expect being in a global location.
>>> 
>>> the only resources i could find on this topic are
>>> http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Deployment_on_Windows
>>> which applies to windows only - i'd need the same thing for linux.
>> 
>> I think that's obsolete and someone (hint to anyone on the list) might 
>> revise it.
>> 
>> For a while now it's been moderately easy to deploy standalone GNUstep 
>> systems using the mechanisms in the base library documentation under the 
>> section for relocatable packages, which basically allow you to define the 
>> locations of all resources and directories relative to wherever the base 
>> library is installed.
>> 
>> What we miss, for making it *really* simple, is a standard layout (in the 
>> FilesystemLayouts directory of gnustep-make) to provide the GNUstep.conf 
>> file to put everything in the same directory (assuming that's what you 
>> want). At the moment you need to edit such a file by hand rather than using 
>> a predefined one.  
>> 
> 
> ok thanks, thats more encouraging ;-)
> 
> 
> i guess thats just what i will do. i'll come back either with a set of 
> working steps, or with problem reports ;->

Thanks ...

In case the documentation is not clear, what you probably want to do is simply 
configure/build gnustep-base using 
configure --with-config-file=./GNUstep.conf
and incude your custom GNUstep.conf file (full of paths starting with './') 
with the base library and everything else you want in your app folder.

Of course, the other thing you might need to do is have the script which starts 
the app set up the environment variable to tell the system loader to look in 
the app wrapper for libraries.  The GNUstep.sh script will do that for you as 
long as you have the GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE environment variable set to point to 
your GNUstep.conf (if you don't define the environment variable, GNUstep.sh 
will look for GNUsterp.conf in the default location).