different GNUstep questions and comments

[Patrick Middleton]

I'm a Cocoa developer.  I first saw OPENSTEP running on NeXT hardware as 
the 4.0 prerelease 3 in late 1995, and then I went back to NX3.3. for a 
bit.  I've worked on WebObjects and on OPENSTEP/Cocoa apps, on 
OPENSTEP/Mach, MacOSX, and WebObjectsDeveloper 4.5.1 on Windows.  I've 
been asked to look at GNUstep (Windows/MinGW) with a view to porting 
some fairly big OPENSTEP/Mach projects.

The Windows standalone installer for the 1.10 make and base packages 
worked flawlessly.

I am now struggling to get together all the libraries for the GNUstep 
gui package to configure.  It appears there's no current distribution of 
libpng that provides a prebuilt dll and import library and headers, for 
exmple.  Trying to build one is problematic as the libpng project 
doesn't 'configure', and while there is a provided makefile for Cygwin, 
there isn't for MinGW.  Similarly, I can build openssl 0.9.7e from 
source, as that does provide a configuration mechanism for MinGW, but 
the build products don't include DLLs and I'm not sure yet what to do 
about it.  [Still, it's nice to be using something newer than a 
toolchain based on Cygwin, circa gcc-2.7.2.1 ]

Of course I could configure without openssl or png, but losing png in 
particular is going to compromise my evaluation.

One of the things that fascinated me about OPENSTEP/Mach was that having 
installed the Developer packages -- and there was a lot more to install 
than for the User operating system, especially if you installed to 
enable development on and for all supported architectures -- you were 
ready to go once the installer finished., without needing even a single 
reboot.

Is anybody working on a Windows standalone installer for the current 
GNUstep gui package?
And for ProjectCenter, GORM, and assorted other developer apps and tools?

-- Patrick