Re: libgnustep-base split proposal

[Jeremy Cowgar]

On Feb 22, 2006, at 1:29 PM, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> I boggled when I read that ... then realised that my initial  
> incomprehension was due to 20+ years experience programming on unix  
> style systems ... it simply didn't occur to me that copying the  
> library from one directory to another would be an issue for a  
> developer (for a user, yes).  GNUstep is by no means alone in  
> putting its libraries in its own directories ... many packages  
> (ssh, postgres etc) use their own subdirectories.

It's not hard, obviously. But, what about when you upgrade your  
system, begin working on another system, copy from your development  
box to your deploy box, upgrade your servers, etc... It becomes a  
head ache trying to remember do this for this program, this special  
thing for that program, etc...

All I am getting at is it would be nice to have an objective C  
library that installs w/no strings attached and allowed one to  
program in Objective C w/o knowing a thing about the existence of  
*anything* special or even the existence of GNUstep for that matter.  
A simple libobjcbase.so, a /usr/include/objc and be done with it.

Then on top of all that, yeah, I give my program to John Doe and say  
John Doe, you have to install gnustep-base, then copy this folder to  
that folder, then move the includes from here to there, then do this,  
then that, then compile my program, then copy it from here to the / 
usr/bin and put it's libs in /usr/lib, etc... Obviously *some* of  
that can be automated but... Now, John Doe is a new unix user. It  
get's harder. Now he is a windows user and it's really hard.

I don't understand objections to having a great objc library that  
people can use. The easier we make it for people to use ObjC, the  
more people are going to use it and the more use GNUstep is going to  
see as a benefit. Why can it not be easy as installing libjpeg?

Jeremy