Re: GNUstep installation - a 'Newbie' question

[Tobias]

hi,
sorry for jumping in the discussion.

> > I imagine being a recommendation on the GNUstep site, telling me which
> > distro has been tested and is easy to install from scratch.
>
> I don't think that's a good idea, as people ususally have a certain
> preference. Instead, it would be better to collect user experiences with
> different Operating Systems slash Distribution.
yes, we should strongly avoid giving any recommendations regarding os choice.
there will always be different opinions (my green shoe is much better than 
your daemon, not that this is up to discussion, we all know daemons are 
simply cuter than clothes)

> [...] morph GNUstep into a "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" (for you
> non-native German speakers, that's a legendary animal in German
> mythology ;-) may not be the way to go.

just to make even more clean to the non-german crowd, what the 'egg-laying 
wool-milk sow' (hope my limited english does not worsen this term) is:
this happens to describe software (not limited to this, better say 
components), like emacs (EightyMegsAndConstantlySwapping), which try to do 
too much, thus (possibly) debase useability.


> What about offering precompiled binaries of all necessary libs and make
> them available for download?
>
> Or, maybe even better, what about including all necessary libs 'inside'
> GNUstep's source tree and have them compile and link during install? At
> least that would assure that all required libs are available and
> installed...

i dont think it is favorable to have whole xlibs in gnustep cvs (this is what 
it will be).
every os outer there (except maybe solaris, and windows is no os) should be/ 
is able to do this with a packet manager. 
*bsd, debian, gentoo, mandrake, xandros, suse, red hat, at least every free os 
has the infrastructure to support these packages.

its up to the package builders to build these packages.
some are already built, so this should not be that problem.

the problem is more pr, promoting how this can be done.

just checked on debian unstable. recent -back is 0.8.5 which is quiet new.

maybe we should just put a page on gnustep.org saying, how to get a working 
gnustep on major unices.

debian:
apt-get install gworkspace gsdict gorm projectcenter terminal gnumail 
apps-wrappers affiche (wmaker)

you already outlined the procedure on freebsd.

something like this may help gnustep in getting more testers, and this does 
not give us so much more burden.

just my .02€,
~ibotty