Availability of Foundation objects outside of GNUstep environment

[Michael Hopkins]

Hi all

We are trying to get to a situation where we can deploy Foundation-based
command line apps on Windows without any GNUstep environment being present ­
just the required DLLs, which I believe are.

 * gnustep-base.dll
 * libiconv-2.dll 
 * objc.dll 
 * zlib1.dll

Morgan Giddings has said that his team has got this working for quite a
substantial application.  Here is a chunk of an email that I just sent him
and I would be very interested if anyone here had input on the questions I
ask below.

TIA 

Michael

============================================================================

>> Have just got GNUstep/MSYS/MingW working for Windows via Virtual PC on the
>> Mac.  Obviously not fast, but it seems to build GNUstep base command line
>> applications for Windows fine, which is all we will need.
>>  
>> I have a couple of questions regarding the packaging of your main program
>> with the DLLs outside of a GNUstep environment:
>>   
>> 1. Does it ever need to find language/locale/user defaults and if so does
>> this work without a GNUstep environment to work within?  For example, we get
>> this runtime error  ³In NSUserDefaults +standardUserDefaults] Improper
>> installation: No language locale found²
> 
> This is one aspect of Foundation we don't use.  Since the command line app is
> meant to be run as any unixy tool would, we didn't use preferences in the way
> that a GUI app would. 

OK.

I wonder if you, as an experienced user of the OpenStep Foundation objects,
know or can point me to some links that say - in the context of a
GNUstep-free environment (i.e. just the DLLs available):

  1) Which objects will definitely work - you mentioned "distributed
     objects, NSDate, NSFileManager, NSTask, NSLock, NSThread, and all the
     collection types, including strings, arrays, dictionaries, sets, and so
     on" in an earlier mail.

  2) Which objects will definitely not work - we got the error message above
     using NSURL, NSString and NSLog, but not sure which one triggered it.

The others are then a target for more research!


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