Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Matt Rice]

On 2007-02-10 17:34:59 -0800 Nicola Pero 
<address@hidden> wrote:

> > The only objection i've heard from gnustep.pc is "Its not the way 
> > GNUstep 
> > stores information".
>
> Here is a refresher --
>
> 1. it adds an external dependency upon which *everything* would depend

an entirely optional dependency, people could continue sourcing 
GNUstep.sh.

> 2. it is slower

-make is not a bottleneck...
for example on my machine....
-make building base here takes 2 minutes 3 seconds...
make when base is already built takes 2 seconds..
where adding this stuff to make would be 0.006th of a second per 
invocation of pkg-config/gnustep-config

this argument is hogwash.

> 3. it is designed for something else (which adds complexity)

It does exactly the same thing gnustep-config.sh does.
that adds no complexity...

> 4. it requires rewriting and redesigning stuff with no clear 
> advantages

there are clear advantages...
now I can add stuff to configure for things *using* gnustep-make which 
attempts to see if
GNUstep libraries exist.

there could be a way to bootstrap gnustep-make to "just work" without 
any gnustep specific
environment variables.

> > The objection i have with GNUstep.conf is it isolates gnustep from 
> > the rest 
> > of the world.
>
> I find that objection vague.  Can you explain the practical meaning of
> "it isolates gnustep from the rest of the world" ?
>
>
> It's a text file in /etc/GNUstep.conf containing something like

it can be set by --with-config-file when configuring make.
If this is done, GNUstep can find GNUstep.conf without setting
GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE... GNUSTEP_CONFIG_FILE is
provided to override the location of /etc/GNUstep.conf if you
didn't change the default GNUstep.conf location.

I refuse to rely on a feature which
a) 99% of the time is fine.
b) the 1% of the time works unless your relying on GNUstep.conf being 
findable

theres no way to reliably locate it if the caller was not generated by 
GNUstep-make's
configure script.

> GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT=/usr/GNUstep/System
> GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT=/usr/GNUstep/Local
>
> It's not like we're designing a massive new language to use in the 
> config 
> file.  We
> have a sequence of key=value lines in a plain text file.

Thats all fine and dandy if it can be located.

> Editing GNUstep.conf is something that should be very unusual, but if 
> it 
> happens,
> it shouldn't be very difficult.  It's just a plain key=value text 
> file!

that is why i don't understand the need to refrain from duplicate 
information in GNUstep.conf and
gnustep.pc

if you are relocating a build environment (should be much more unusual 
than GNUstep.conf requiring being changed)
modify gnustep.pc and GNUstep.conf
otherwise modify GNUstep.conf

not very difficult