[Swarm-Support] About some little troubles I encountered when I migrated my swarm app

[Thomas Louail]

Hi everybody,

I recently had to migrate my swarm app from a dedicated server to 
several desktop PCs, and i faced some little troubles i guess should 
return, and i think it's a good place to do so :)

Let's be a little bit more verbose about my past and present configs :

The swarm app core (in objC swarm 2.2) used to run on a dedicated linux 
server (debian 3.4 distro), and the swarm library running on it was 
compiled and installed in 2002 i think (i'm not quite sure because i 
wasn't workin' on the project at that time). Taking a look at Swarm 
versions calendar, it seems that the 2.2 version was already released at 
that time, but maybe some modifications were made since ? Anyway, when 
calling my app with the '-v' option, i can see it uses the 2.2 version. 
For different reasons, the server hasn't been maintained for a while and 
lots of packages haven't been updated; in particular the gcc version 
running on the server is gcc3, which was more permissive to some 
constructions, like nested functions for example, and the code of my 
applications made use of that;

When i decided to migrate the code on my desktop machine, running ubuntu 
8.4, i compiled and installed swarm (/usr/include) in the standard way, 
the swarm apps from coming with Paul Johson's package are running fine, 
everything is allright. When i ran a 'make' command in my app's 
directory, i had to face some gcc-dependant troubles related with my 
code, but in addition i faced some difficulties which I think are coming 
from the way swarm installed on my desktop machine.

For example i got this error :

> Dans le fichier inclus à partir de base/SP2Control.m:16:
> /usr/local/include/defobj/FArguments.h:29:21: erreur: internal.h : 
> Aucun fichier ou répertoire de ce type
> /usr/local/include/defobj/FArguments.h:33:20: erreur: avcall.h : Aucun 
> fichier ou répertoire de ce type
> In file included from base/SP2Control.m:16:
> /usr/local/include/defobj/FArguments.h:55: erreur: expected 
> specifier-qualifier-list before «av_alist"
> /usr/local/include/defobj/FArguments.h:56: erreur: expected 
> specifier-qualifier-list before «av_alist"
> base/SP2Control.m: In function «doCall":
> base/SP2Control.m:392: attention : implicit declaration of function 
> «fcall_type_for_objc_type"
> base/SP2Control.m: In function «doCall":
> base/SP2Control.m:492: attention : implicit declaration of function 
> «find_ivar"
> base/SP2Control.m:492: attention : assignment makes pointer from 
> integer without a cast
> make: *** [SP2Control.o] Erreur 1

as some part are in french, i resume the error : in my file 
base/SP2Control.m, i included the file FArguments.h located in the 
defobj package. This one contains an import directive to internal.h, and 
taking a look at /usr/include/defobj, i can see that include.h is 
missing. I got the same kind of error for the file avcall.h as you can 
see on line 3

Finally i made my app compile by taking the files from the src/ 
directory that i got when downloading the swarm distrib, and i copied 
those "missing" files into my /usr/local/include/ directory
I wonder : it seems that some .h files are not copied during the final 
part of the installation process (make install). Is it just me, or do 
you think that any app installed in a standard way on ubuntu and which 
would make use of some FArguments functions would fail the same way at 
compilation time ?

Thanks a lot for your answer, help and time
Have a good day,

Thomas