Re: What's the new direction?

[Ivan Vučica]

I meant "developers participating in GNUstep project, with commit rights" :-)

And I by no means meant "this is unnecessary"; I meant "there is a lack of motivation for someone to sit down and go through it properly".

As David said, most core developers people use VMs. I personally sometimes reboot, as some OpenGL-related things are broken in VirtualBox. But noone has an actual day-to-day pressing need to make it work under OS X. I'd like it (to avoid the aforementioned reboots).

I don't think anyone's that dismissive about supporting GNUstep-directly-under-OS X; but, it would take work. I personally would think focusing on getting upstream gnustep-base to be usable under Android is more interesting :-)

On Sun Dec 22 2013 at 8:49:04 PM, Jamie Ramone <sancombru@gmail.com> wrote:

Actually, he just said developers, which can mean "GNUstep maintainers" or "developers who use GNUstep in their projects". True, there may not be much need among the 1st category, but there is in the 2nd. That's what I referring to when mentioning the dismissed requests for help. I guess we could chalk it up as a misunderstanding on both ends :)

On Sun, Dec 22, 2013 at 3:22 PM, David Chisnall <David.Chisnall@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

On 22 Dec 2013, at 17:56, Jamie Ramone <sancombru@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't think there's a lack of need. Just look at how many people have been asking for help on this issue lately. Every time I see them the reply is usually "why would you or anyone want to do that?" Testing some software they're developing in Cocoa on GNUstep without the need of a VM as you said is just one example. They could want to do that to make sure it'll work properly on non-Mac systems. Or to move away from it. Or because of an issue with proprietary software, whether ideologically or practically inclined (e.g. licensing issue of some kind). In any case all those replies DO suggests reluctance, which is why I said what I said.

Ivan said a lack of need from GNUstep developers, and he's mostly right because most of us develop in some VM or on native non-Mac platforms.

I definitely agree that there's a need to gave GNUstep working on OS X, however, to ease porting.  I'd love it if we could ship and XCode plugin that would let people test their code with OS X in XQuartz and then just recompile on FreeBSD[1].  It would also be nice if we could bundle WINE and provide an environment for testing Windows builds.  Now that Apple is shipping a recent clang, it's easy to cross compile, you just need a sysroot with the relevant libraries / headers and a GNU ld for the target platform.

Obviously, for real deployment, you're going to want to set up a VM (or a real machine) with the target platform and do QA there, but having to sync the code between the Mac and the VM seems to be too much of a barrier for some people.

David

[1] On Linux they'll need to also port to glibc most likely.