Re: SSL bundle

[David Chisnall]

On 10 Feb 2008, at 15:33, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> In most cases it does not cause any trouble to always include  
> gui.make.
> Only on already inconsistent systems we should be able to produce a
> better warning message and fall back to something sensible. The  
> ability
> to link without gui is a nice add-on, that should be possible, but not
> on the cost of breaking most applications out there.

I've come across problems with the automatic linking of -gui when  
writing command-line applications with GNUstep.  Anything that  
interacts with the runtime and does things like enumerating loaded  
classes (useful for glueless plugins and so on, and used by UnitKit)  
is likely to trigger +initialize messages being sent to AppKit  
classes, which have limited (or no) error handling for cases where the  
X server is not present and often cause unexpected breakage (- 
respondsToSelector: should never throw an exception, for example, and  
so code assumes this and when you try to move it to a guiless  
application you will find things going seriously wrong).

Having, at the very least, an option not to link -gui, even if it's  
installed, would be very handy, and it really should be the default  
for TOOLs.

David