Re: different GNUstep questions and comments

[Nicolas Roard]

Le 26 oct. 04, à 15:13, Patrick Middleton a écrit :

> 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 ]

Actually, there is a libpng+configure version that you can find on 
libpng site, if I don't confond with another of the graphic lib ;-)
Anyway, I compiled it without a problem on windows (but I had lots of 
problems with libtiff, on the other hand).

In the end, I think the best solution is in fact to not even bother to 
compile libpng/libjpeg/libtiff/libungif, but just to grab the files of 
the gnuwin32 distribution, copy
the .h,.a and .dll -- that should be enough.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html

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

Understandable :)
Although one problem you'll see with the GDI graphic backend ..  is 
that it doesn't handle properly transparency. That's particularly 
annoying for icons, as you can see on the various screenshots of 
GNUstep/Windows :-) -- it would be nice if somebody knowledgeable in 
windows programming would fix that..

> 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?

--
Nicolas Roard
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
 -Arthur C. Clarke