> but my main problem with GNUstep.sh isn't actually technical at all, > its the very first thing potential developers are going to see, so > will be the first impression, > and imho gives the impression of being strange because it is uncommon > for a build system to depend on environment variables to function.
I looked at your patch and I understand what you're trying to do ... it's good stuff and it's good to have this discussion, but let me first insist in claryfying something ... ;-) The build system does not depend on GNUstep.sh at all. We spent years working on removing that dependency, and it's no longer there! :-) It's not advertised much yet, but it will be clearly advertised in the release note of the forthcoming gnustep-make release. GNUstep.sh is obsolete in the default setup. You only need to set GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES and everything will work (assuming you have your tools in your path, and libs in your linker paths). This is all already implemented on trunk! :-) So forget about GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT, GNUSTEP_XX_YY. You don't need to set those variables to compile or run stuff. In fact, they are deprecated as shell variables. You shouldn't be using them. You may use them as make variables, keeping in mind they will have limited meaning/usefulness once we have support for non-GNUstep FHSes! ;-) You only need to set GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES. This is already on trunk! Once that's clear, we can discuss the patch ;-) I see two good ideas in the patch ... 1. I guess you are suggesting to put a makefile somewhere in the make search path and change all makefiles to include it so that you can compile without even setting GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES. I like the idea of not having to set any variable to compile, but I also see a couple of obvious cons -- it would be more difficult to switch between different gnustep-make installations (at the moment, you can easily switch by just changing GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES!), and we need to ask everyone on the planet to change their GNUmakefiles, and in a way that will likely make them stop working unless you use a recent gnustep-make - they won't like it. So we need to think a lot and make sure we make the right choice before we do it. Eg, if you have to modify your make include path to make this work, then you may as well ask people to set GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES. ;-) 2. you're suggesting to have a script that can help ./configure scripts examine the filesystem for GNUstep softtware. That sounds good, but having the script return GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT etc seems the wrong thing to do -- these are the variables that make it difficult to switch to Linux FHS and we are trying to move away from them! In fact, we have already moved away from them. As shell variables, they are obsolete and should not be used! Finally, your gnustep.pc seems a duplicate of /etc/GNUstep.conf! ;-) Thanks _______________________________________________ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev