Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Helge Hess]

On Jan 25, 2007, at 01:35, Matt Rice wrote:
> Anyhow i'll read this more thoroughly tomorrow,
> but my main problem with GNUstep.sh isn't actually technical at all,
> its the very first thing potential developers are going to see, so  
> will be the first impression, and imho gives the impression of  
> being strange because it is uncommon for a build system to depend  
> on environment variables to function.

Yes. The thing we do (... ;-) is to have a very small (hand written)  
'configure' script which locates gnustep-make and writes a small  
'config.make' files containing the relevant GS variables. Then all  
makefiles include that config.make file like this:

-include config.make
include $(GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES)/common.make

If configure was run, it works w/o an environment. If it wasn't, it  
still works when GNUstep.sh is sourced. Which is quite nice IMHO ;-)
[actually SOPE even embeds gstep-make and builds that as part of the  
'configure' process if it can't find an installed gstep-make. Which  
makes the package completely self-contained, IMHO rather nice and  
similiar to autoconf]

Possibly a 'make dist' should automatically generate such a configure  
script for a given project?
Don't know. Probably there is a smart solution to the issue ;-)

BTW: personally I'm not quite sure whether I understand that /etc/ 
GNUstep.conf thing :-) Is it necessary or optional?

Greets,
  Helge
--
Helge Hess
http://www.helgehess.eu/