Re: GCC Framework support in Linux (fwd)

[Adam Fedor]

On Sunday, August 17, 2003, at 12:15 AM, David Ayers wrote:

> I still haven't looked closely at the changes yet.  I'm still a bit 
> boged down with other GCC issues.  (And I know there are also GDL2 
> issues piling up.)  But I'm not convinced we have a consensus yet on 
> the issue itself.  What are we interested in?  Do we simply request 
> for the same semantics Apple is proposing plus platform specific 
> handling?  Or potentially hooks for arbitrarily selecting the library 
> at load time (libcombo issue)?  I now that other GNUstep developers 
> agree with Niel Booth that most of these issues should remain Darwin 
> specific for now.  Personally I'm uneasy about incompatibilty without 
> due reason, but that's personal gut feeling, as sometimes follwing 
> Apple in the wrong direction can be costly.
The changes are pretty simple as they only apply to header searches. 
Since our frameworks are organized the same as Apple's, we could use 
the same semantics. For instance if someone wanted to link in a 
framework. we would use:

gcc [...bla...] -F /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Frameworks 
-F/usr/GNUstep/Local/Library/Frameworks [...bla...] -framework 
MyFramework

which simplifies things for us since we don't have to symbolic link all 
frameworks to the Headers directory. I'm just wondering if it would be 
useful to anyone else besides Apple and GNUstep. Or does it matter?

It would be nice additionally if we could set default framework 
directories as well - right now the defaults are specific to darwin.


> Very true.  Actually while we're pondering about this, maybe we should 
> also consider our special extensions for debug and profile versions of 
> a library.  I think that some mechanism to optinally turn of the 
> special extensions would be really nice and probably should be 
> dafault.  I spend a lot of time

Interesting idea, although it's more of a developer problem and not a 
user problem - still it would make bug reporting easier if we could 
compile the core libraries with debugging turned on all the time... 
Additionally, I compile everything with debug=yes, and it would be nice 
to set that as the default so I wouldn't have to type it all the time...