Ok ... I had to start Windows up to check some web pages under IE 7, and then since I was there I thought I'd give another try to GNUstep on Windows. It looks pretty cool.
I updated the core/make/Documentation/README.MinGW file on trunk. Please note that (between other things) the recommended filesystem layout on mingw is now the new 'mingw' filesystem layout. The reason for that is that in this way you don't need to source GNUstep.sh any more. :-) With the new GNUstep.conf stuff, things are pretty easy/nice to package. I did package Gorm.app and Gomoku.app as standalone binaries that can be shipped, and documented the process in README.MinGW. :-) I'll maybe put the Windows binaries of Gomoku.app on the Gomoku web pages for people to try out. I have a few comments on the Win32 support though: 1. the alert panel asking you to set your 'Server Preferences' is very annoying and very unprofessional. I keep getting it any time I change something and it's horrid. :-( The first thing that a user sees when they start a GNUstep application is this obscure alert requesting some obscure settings to be changed. Because it's an alert, it also very much gives the impression that things are just broken. I think we should get rid of it. ;-) Obviously the default on Windows should be using the Windows taskbar and using Windows window decorations!, with the 'WindowMaker' way of doing things being triggered only by advanced users who tweak their user defaults manually. Is it OK if I remove this panel and make the Windows behaviour the default ? :-) 2. NSTask generates an alert (and crashes the program) saying it can't start './gdnc'. I imagine that path is used since gnustep-base.dll and gdnc.exe are in the same directory ? But then NSTask would interpret it relatively to the current directory, so it wouldn't find './gdnc' ? Anyway, I guess I can fix that. :-) 3. gdnc.exe and gpbs.exe are quite annoying in general. When you have your standalone application on a USB flash disk, the app starts nicely, and it automatically starts gdnc.exe and gpbs.exe. Cool. Unfortunately, when you quit the application, they keep running. If you now try removing the USB flash disk, Windows doesn't let you, because it can't unmount a flash disk from which programs are running. The average user would definitely be stuck at that point since you have no clue about which programs are running from the USB disk (they are not visible anywhere that an average user can see). Not sure how to fix the problem. Anyway, looked much more encouraging than I thought. The GNUstep.conf relocation stuff does really work (I guess that's nothing new, Richard had already done that, but I had never tried it out). :-) Thanks _______________________________________________ Gnustep-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
