Re: Compiling from scratch.

[Chris B. Vetter]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2003 07:57:39 +0200
"Pascal J.Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:
> I'm  definitely qualified  to debug  the compilation  and installation
> process. The point is not here,  it's to allow people less advanced in
> programming to install easily gnustep.   Perhaps they only want to run
> a GNUstep  application, perhaps they're only  beginner programmers who
> want  to learn Objetive-C.   In any  case, when  you can  download and
> compile  with the  mere './configure;make;make  install'  thousands of
> packages, there's  not reason  why it should  be more  complicated for
> gnustep.

I don't think you can compare a project as complex as GNUstep to
"thousands of packages", only to a handful.

And even those have requirements that must be met before the configure
script will run and create a Makefile for you to run 'make' afterwards.
Eg. on my system here, Perl 5 is required to successfully install GTK.
If it isn't installation will fail, so naturally I have to make sure it
is.
Of course I won't know about it, unless I read the documentation
(preferably first ;-) or ran configure (or whatever is needed) which
barfs about the missing Perl...

Same thing, only that GNUstep's 'compile-all' will happily continue to
(try and) install the rest of core, which it shouldn't.

If you want to have GNUstep install in one go, without users be bothered
to think about requirements, we would have to either discard any
dependencies (which is impossible) or would have to bundle the important
ones and compile them along with GNUstep.

Problem I see here is that it will be kinda insane to keep up-to-date
with external projects, like ffcall, libffi or libtiff or whathaveyou.

-- 
Chris