Re: GNUstep objc compiler idea

[Nicola Pero]

> Hi all,
> 
> Isn't it more logical and less problamatic for the user to put
> gnustep-objc into gnustep-make?
> When the compiler is detected it can be decided to build the
> gnustep-objc within the GNUstep tree, or if the objc runtime is
> up-to-date, just skip the build.
> 
> This makes GNUstep more easy to install for people.

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for the idea - I thought I would give a short answer - even if I'm
pretty sure you already know everything I'm saying :-)

gnustep-objc is for past compilers.  Our hope for the future is ... nobody
will have to go through the pain of installing manually gnustep-objc ever
again. :-)

for newer compilers, you don't need gnustep-objc at all - and actually the
libobjc shipped with GCC 3.1 should be much better than gnustep-objc
itself !  So much better that it is a step backward to install
gnustep-objc if you can use GCC 3.1's libobjc.

So - we are basically going away from gnustep-objc - it's already sort of
unmaintained.  We try to put all improvements and changes directly into
GCC's libobjc - so that once you install a new GCC (> 3.x), it all works
very nicely without need to replace the compiler's libobjc with another
one.

Shipping gnustep-objc inside gnustep-make might make sense for the part of
users still using past (< 3.x) compilers ... but it would be not where we
want to go - we want to completely drop gnustep-objc, at least for mass
usage - and we hope as people slowly move towards newer compilers, fewer
and fewer users in the future will need to manually install gnustep-objc
... hopefully at some point nobody will. :-)