Re: gnustep-config script is within the GNUstep directory structure....

[Nicola Pero]

> My understanding of *-config scripts is that they are put into a  
> standard place in order for applications or development scripts to  
> be able to locate a given package.
>
> It doesn't really make sense that gnustep-config should live inside  
> of the GNUstep directories since it's purpose is to help to locate  
> them and, to invoke it you would need to know where the GNUstep  
> libraries are.... which seems very circular to me.
>
> Any thoughts on this?

I was planning on adding a new ./configure option to gnustep-make to  
put gnustep-config in some other location - for people
who so wish.  It will be added. :-)

Said that, I don't feel there is the circular problem: you can't use  
GNUstep (or any other software) unless you have software in your PATH
and libraries in your linker path.  There's not even any point in  
locating GNUstep if it doesn't work at all.  You must get your PATH  
and linker
path setup to use GNUstep.  There's nothing gnustep-config can do  
about that. :-(

So now if you have a working GNUstep installation, your  
GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_TOOLS dir is in your PATH, and
gnustep-config lives very well in there.  gnustep-config is not  
supposed to magically fix PATHs - it's for finding linker flags
or getting variables in a working GNUstep installation. ;-)

(btw, gnustep-config is a script and does not need the linker path to  
be setup properly, only the standard PATH). ;-)

Anyway, we can have a configure/filesystem layout option to move  
gnustep-config somewhere else for people who so wish,
but in practice, whoever is smart enough to figure out that option is  
also smart enough to configure his system properly
so that GNUstep just works - so I don't see much benefit from it. ;-)

If you want to make things easy for the general public, we could  
change the default filesystem layout to be FHS.  That
would be easier. :-) Else, they'll have to add

 . /usr/GNUstep/System/Library/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh

to

 /etc/profile

like they have always had to do :-(

Putting gnustep-config into /usr/local/bin by default won't make  
things any easier - they would still have to source GNUstep.sh
else nothing would work, and now we have yet another PATH to add to  
the PATHs to find gnustep-config - in a sense, we made
finding gnustep-config harder, not easier.

Thanks