Re: gnustep-make on OSX

[Helge Hess]

Nicola Pero wrote:
> Here we are really talking about something different - it's that the
> bundle structure of NeXTstep is different from the bundle structure of
> GNUstep which is different from the bundle structure of Apple OSX.  

OK, I see the point now ;-)

> > :-) Is there already something new for OSX in CVS ?
> I'm now actively thinking. :-)

Excellent ;-)

> But then, I can see the following problem - if you write an application
> which depends on this library/framework, on GNUstep you would write
>
> ADDITIONAL_GUI_LIBS += -lRenaissance
>
> while on OSX if Renaissance is a framework, you would need
>
> ADDITIONAL_GUI_LIBS += -framework Renaissance
>
> Maybe the solution would be to have the conversion done automatically by
> gnustep-make, or to use a new variable name and have gnustep-make add the
> -l on gnustep, and the -framework on OSX.

This is tricky, you are right. But couldn't which_lib easily process 
this information (take a look whether a MyLib.framework exists) ?

> > BTW: in OSX you can bundle frameworks in any bundle. Eg for 

> > distribution you can add all required frameworks into the application 
> > bundle. All this makes it very easy to install apps for the user.
>
> Hmmmm.  Ok.
>
> Well, as a personal comment, except for the resources, this is basically
> statically linking the application to all the libraries it depends upon,
> which generates very big executables.  Very easy to install, but very big.

There are some things to consider:
a) probably the bundled frameworks are usually "private" frameworks. Eg 
in OmniWeb there is the networking code, the HTML rendering framework, 
the ... - all this isn't really used by any other application. In this 
case this really is just a packaging thing - the developers separates 
the stuff to separate things during development and the user can install 
a single wrapper.

b) do we have a harddisk space issue ? IMHO not. I don't care whether 
the .app takes 1MB or 10MB, doesn't matter these days ;-)

c) do we have a memory problem ? This is an interesting one. I wonder 
whether the MacOSX dynamic linker does use the path for linking or 
whether it can share frameworks based on the versioning information and 
on the name ? Maybe Marcel nows about that one ?

> I frankly prefer a lot more the package manager way of linux lands, which
> installs (and uninstalls!) applications and shared libraries properly,
> manage dependencies between things etc. :-)

Very good too (you know I *like* RPM ;-), but OSX doesn't have that. I'm 
talking about using gstep-make on OSX, and this probably should include 
that (OSX) way of packaging things.

Greetings
  Helge