GNUstep questions and comments

[Peter Schols]

Dear GNUStep developer,

I'm a biologist and self-made Cocoa developer. Over the past few years, 
I have heard a lot about GNUstep but I never took the time to give it a 
serious look.
Yesterday, I finally installed GNUstep on a Windows 2000 machine. The 
reason I'm trying out GNUstep is to port my bioinformatics apps and 
frameworks to Linux and Windows. First of all, I must say I'm impressed 
with the current state of the frameworks! I was able to build the 
entire core library, including gui and back. Running graphical apps 
works quite well, even on Windows!

However, I still have a few questions and some suggestions.

Here are my questions:
- I built the core libs without (much) problems. However, I can't seem 
to compile Gorm or ProjectCenter. While building Gorm, I get the 
following error (using Gorm 0.8.0, MinGW, Windows 2000):
.../mingw/bin/dllwrap.exe: no export definition file provided. Creating 
one but that may not be what you want.
.../mingw/bin/dllwrap.exe: gcc exited with status 1
some more errors related to this. Any clues?
- Launching a GNUstep app (by double-clicking the .exe file in 
Explorer) always yields a command prompt window. Is there an easy way 
to avoid this?
- I'd like to bundle the compiled .exe together with all .dll files, 
gdomap.exe and gdnc.exe into one executable Windows file. I'm looking 
for some hints to do this.

My comments:
- In its current state, GNUstep is a great environment and it makes 
Cocoa/ObjC even more attractive for bioinformatics. Major 
bioinformatics journals require that applications run on all major 
platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). While I could just write my apps 
in Java, I really like ObjC and Cocoa. GNUstep is the perfect tool to 
port Cocoa apps to other platforms. Congratulations!
- Now that a lot of work has been done and GNUstep runs on Windows and 
Linux, it would be great if there were Windows installers for the 
entire core (including libtiff, ...). That would really drive GNUstep 
adoption since I know a lot of Cocoa developers interested in bringing 
their apps to GNUstep but hesitant to spend days to get everything up 
and running. I think a lot of developers are even willing to pay for a 
good Windows GNUstep installer, which would benefit the GNUstep project 
even more.
-  I'd like to underscore the importance of the graphical appearance of 
GNUStep apps on Windows and other platforms. If GNUStep Windows apps 
could get support for native Windows menus and other controls, that 
would be killer! I'm guess this would not be so difficult when compared 
with the effort that has already been done.

I'm well aware that GNUStep is a community initiative and that it is 
dependent upon the hard work of only a handful of people. I'm always 
willing to help the GNUstep project but I'm not a 'real programmer', 
just a biologist writing apps. However, I'll definitely promote GNUStep 
in the Cocoa/Bioinformatics community as much as I can.

Keep up the great work!
Best wishes,

Peter

Peter Schols
Laboratory of Plant Systematics - K.U.Leuven
www.kuleuven.ac.be/bio/sys
Kasteelpark Arenberg 31
3001 Leuven
Belgium