GNUstep Development environment installer for Windows

[Tom Koelman]

Hi,

I created an experimental installer for Windows that contains
basically everything needed to build applications with GNUstep base.
What it does is the following:

- Install MSYS + MinGW
- Copy all needed sources and binaries to the system
- Optionally actually build the base libary

I think this is quite handy to quickly see whether the base sources
compile out of the box under Windows. I can create an installer for
given tags of the CVS repository to make a package that can easily be
distributed to and tested on several systems.

The installer lets you choose a $GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, which in the end
will be a completely self contained depelopment environment that can
link against GNUstep base. Deleting this tree deletes everything that
is actually installed. This is achieved by installing the sources and
MSYS+MinGW in a subdirectory of $GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT.

The installer tries to log everything it does, so when things go wrong
the problem source can be traced.

It currently can be downloaded from
ftp://ftp.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/windows/ and is called
Install-GNUstep-Development-Environment-0.4.1.exe. It contains make
and base from the 1.6.0 freeze branch and libobjc from the main
branch, taken from CVS at the 24th of Februari 2003.

Give it a whirl and tell me what you think. All questions, opinions
and suggestions are welcome; I'd like to make the list of known
problems and the list of possible enhancements longer:

Known problems:
- Sometimes sh.exe crashes while building. This is a known problem in
  MSYS that might go away by using a newer version of MSYS
- No user visible error when building fails for some reason. You have to
  inspect the log files to see whether stuff went okay
- No gui+back yet
- No automatic starting of gdomap and friends yet

Possible future enhancements:
- Let the installer contain already built base library
- Make a "user deployment" installer
- Make the installer run an application (defaults.exe?) to show that
  it works

Hope you like it,
Tom Koelman