Re: GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DOMAIN

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Oct 2006, at 04:58, Nicola Pero wrote:

> > > Things should be decoupled ... -make and -base don't really talk  
> > > or depend
> > > on each other.
> >
> > Not entirely true. Currently -base depends on -make for  
> > configuration.
>
> Thanks, I see your point ... which is a very good one :-)
>
> You're suggesting that, for example, in a binary distribution (say,  
> Debian)
> you could install gnustep-base without installing gnustep-make.
>
> Then you can also install any other GNUstep software that is binary  
> packaged
> by the distribution.  You don't need gnustep-make, because  
> everything is
> in the FHS locations and you're not building anything, you're just  
> installing
> binary packages.
>
> I agree it would be a nice thing :-)
>
> In that case, yes, you would need GNUstep.conf, yet you have no  
> gnustep-make
> installed.
>
> I suppose the right way of addressing the issue is to create a
> 'gnustep-common'
> package, that only installs GNUstep.conf.
>
> Then, on top of that, you can install gnustep-make and/or gnustep- 
> base;
> you only
> install gnustep-make if you want to build.
>
> We could make all this explicit by extracting the creation of  
> GNUstep.conf
> into
> a separate software ... to be installed before gnustep-make.  It  
> sounds
> very clumsy
> though ;-)
>
> At the moment, I'd leave everything as it is (a packager could still
> install GNUstep.conf
> in a separate package to get the effect above).

This all sounds complex ... and seems to be based on accepting both  
that gnustep-base depends on gnustep-make for configuration and the  
assumption that this is a problem.
The flaw in that is that base does not depend on make for config  
information (unless it's been broken recently), it merely uses it at  
configure/build time if it is present and not overridden.  Even if  
base did depend on make for config information, I don't see it as  
much of a problem, since if we ever had another package capable of  
building the base library I'm sure it could be made able to provide  
any necessary config information for it too.
> Moving the creation of GNUstep.conf into gnustep-base doesn't make  
> much
> sense,
> because gnustep-make can't work without it.  You may want to use  
> gnustep-make
> without gnustep-base (eg, for building documentation or resources  
> or java
> stuff,
> or for building using non-gnustep-base foundation libraries, eg on
> apple-apple-apple
> or gnu-fd-nil), and at the moment you can't build gnustep-base without
> gnustep-make
> anyway ;-)

Yes, gnustep-make required GNUstep.conf, but gnustep-base does not.  
But even if it was required by base, we could deal with the problem  
when we produced another package capable of building base.

> Anyway, good idea to keep it in mind, I mean, yes, conceptually,  
> the step
> of creating
> GNUstep.conf is separate from gnustep-make and gnustep-base.  It's a
> "preliminary" step
> if you want. ;-)

Yes, analagous to running a configure script ... it's where you set  
up various options.

> > > Yes ... we're not really "almost done". :-( ... we also need to have
> > > gnustep-base load
> > > the directory structure from GNUstep.conf and use it when  
> > > searching for
> stuff
> > > at runtime :-/
> >
> > For long lived processes this might be fine but for short lived tools
> you're
> > imposing a considerable startup delay.
>
> There is already such a delay, since we are already reading  
> GNUstep.conf.
> I doubt
> adding ten more lines or so to read would make any difference in  
> speed.
> If we could avoid
> reading the file altogether, that would be faster. ;-)

Yes, but not much faster ... on my system it takes half a millisecond  
to do the whole process of reading and parsing configuration info ...  
that includes loading both the system GNUstep.conf and my user  
specific one overriding some values in the system-wide one.