Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Nicola Pero]

> 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.

I looked at your patch and I understand what you're trying to do ... it's good
stuff and it's good to have this discussion, but let me first insist in 
claryfying 
something ... ;-)

The build system does not depend on GNUstep.sh at all.  We spent years
working on removing that dependency, and it's no longer there! :-)

It's not advertised much yet, but it will be clearly advertised in the release 
note
of the forthcoming gnustep-make release.  GNUstep.sh is obsolete in the default
setup.

You only need to set GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES and everything will work (assuming you 
have 
your tools in your path, and libs in your linker paths).  This is all already 
implemented on trunk! :-)

So forget about GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT, GNUSTEP_XX_YY.  You 
don't
need to set those variables to compile or run stuff.  In fact, they are 
deprecated
as shell variables.  You shouldn't be using them.  You may use them as make 
variables,
keeping in mind they will have limited meaning/usefulness once we have support 
for
non-GNUstep FHSes! ;-)

You only need to set GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES.  This is already on trunk!

Once that's clear, we can discuss the patch ;-)

I see two good ideas in the patch ...

 1. I guess you are suggesting to put a makefile somewhere in the make search 
path and
change all makefiles to include it so that you can compile without even setting 
GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES.  I like the idea of not having to set any variable to 
compile,
but I also see a couple of obvious cons -- it would be more difficult
to switch between different gnustep-make installations (at the moment, you can 
easily
switch by just changing GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES!), and we need to ask everyone on the 
planet
to change their GNUmakefiles, and in a way that will likely make them stop 
working
unless you use a recent gnustep-make - they won't like it.  So we need to think 
a lot and make
sure we make the right choice before we do it.  Eg, if you have to modify your 
make
include path to make this work, then you may as well ask people to set 
GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES. ;-)

 2. you're suggesting to have a script that can help ./configure scripts 
examine the filesystem for GNUstep softtware.  That sounds good, but having the 
script return GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT, GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT etc seems the wrong thing 
to do -- these are the variables that make it difficult to switch to Linux FHS 
and we are trying to move away from them!  In fact, we have
already moved away from them.  As shell variables, they are obsolete and should 
not be used!  Finally, your gnustep.pc seems a duplicate of /etc/GNUstep.conf! 
;-)

Thanks