Re: State of the 'Step

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 16 Feb 2010, at 09:53, Nicola Pero wrote:

> 
>> what we need for all the other
>> GNUstep applications is that converter from the GNUstep make file to
>> package descriptors and this shouldn't be to hard.
> 
> 
> From past experiences, I'm not sure a "converter" would help that much ;-)
> 
> IMO packaging a standard GNUstep application (say, Gorm) is easy to the point 
> that any
> attempt to automate it makes it more difficult! ;-)
> 
> For example, gnustep-make supports building RPMs out of the box using 
> information you
> type in some special gnustep-make variables in your GNUmakefile.  Nobody uses 
> it
> presumably because you have to read and understand how it works.

Actually, I have used it quite a bit (though not very recently).

> So I'm not sure that there is much to do in terms of automation (but feel 
> free to suggest).  What we really need
> are packagers and package repositories - and exciting end-user products to 
> package of course :-D

The main advantage of using gnustep-make to package RPMs (for me) was that I 
did not need to work out which files needed to be packaged ... the makefile has 
that info built in to it and puts it into the RPM.  I'm not sure if 
gnustep-make has the facility already, but if it could just have a command to 
output a list of all the files needed, that's probably the most help (all 
packages will need that).