Re: GNUstep on OS X

[David Chisnall]

On 20 Jan 2011, at 16:19, Ivan Vučica wrote:

> It's about not being able to compile GNUstep on OS X with MacPorts. My idea 
> of MacPorts is single-command-install, not tracking around why it didn't 
> install. I should not have to worry whether or not it doesn't work because 
> it's trying to use Apple's compiler or not: if it doesn't like Apple's 
> compiler (which I understand), end user wants it to avoid using Apple's 
> compiler. That's it :-)
> 
> Currently, gnustep-base port seems to use GCC 4.2 despite no longer depending 
> on MacPorts GCC 4.2 (which didn't work) and despite me having MacPorts GCC 
> 4.3 and 4.4 installed because they're dependencies of some other packages.

This is a problem with the MacPorts dependency then.  I've never bothered with 
MacPorts under OS X, because it seems to do things in a completely non-Mac-like 
way.  

> Why I'd like to use GNUstep on OS X? Well, I don't necessarily want GNUstep 
> the development environment -- although I'd like to have it so I can more 
> easily develop Linux-targeting apps. For that reason, I also want to have 
> Gorm: I want to use the UI environment that other contributors would use. I 
> want to contribute to the FLOSS ecosystem and to spread the Objective-C love, 
> no matter what the platform is used; just because I currently use OS X 
> doesn't mean I don't want to help spread Objective-C among my friends who use 
> GNU/Linux. And I want to contribute something to myself in case I am no 
> longer able to use a Mac.
> 
> I also want it because I want to play with random GNUstep apps under my 
> day-to-day OS.
> 
> I am also not sure using a combo of Cocoa and GNUstep is a good idea if one 
> wants to target pure GNUstep platforms. Plus, consider that as a developer 
> who just wants to "get things done", I'd like to worry just about getting my 
> underlying libraries to work, not how to get a combo of GNUstep and Cocoa to 
> merge and work happily together :-)

If you want a pure GNUstep environment, I'd recommend VirtualBox.  That's what 
I use for GNUstep development on OS X, and it means that I don't have to worry 
about conflicts between the GNUstep and OS X versions of stuff.  For example, a 
lot of UNIX libraries on OS X link against CoreFoundation, and this causes 
problems for GNUstep base.  Libraries that link against Apple's libobjc cause 
lots of problems.

In theory, you shouldn't need GORM either - If there are problems with GNUstep 
reading nib files from Interface Builder then these are regarded as bugs.  In 
the future, I think we will probably end up using xib files for GNUstep, since 
these are much simpler and cleaner to work with than either the Apple nib or 
GNUstep gorm formats.  I think this is quite near the top of Gregory's TODO 
list.  Although, judging by the last few releases Apple may have made the 
Interface Builder UI worse than GORM by then...

David

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