Re: Cross-compiling GNUstep?

[Markus Hitter]

Am 30.12.2013 08:23, schrieb Richard Frith-Macdonald:
> 
>> Could you elaborate a bit on these advantages of GNUstep Make?
> 
> GNUstep-make is really just gnumake plus some additional
> structure/conventions (encapsulated in a set of make file fragments
> included into your project's make file) ... rather like the
> relationship between ObjC and C.  So you can put anything from a
> 'normal' makefile into a gnustep make file.
> 
> What makes it special are the conventions/knowledge built into it; 
> knowledge about the different project types (command line tools,
> apps, libraries, frameworks), what is included with them plists etc,
> where they should be installed all that sort of stuff. All this
> knowledge is like the build-in rule in standard make that tells it
> how to make a .o file from a .c file (invoke the compiler with
> certain flags using the correct fiel names), but deals with correct
> linker commands, libraries, resources and where everything should go
> and how it should be installed.
> 
> It means that the vast majority of projects essentially need to do no
> more than declare a few variables listing the source files used.
> 
> Other projects mostly might want to add dependencies on external
> libraries etc, so there are variables for plugging those into all the
> standard rules.

Thanks.


> I'm also dubious about CMake's ability to integrate to GNUstep at the
> makefile level; With autoconf/automake we simply don't use automake,
> and have autoconf generate .h and .make file fragments to use in the
> build process. With CMake the configure/build processes are more
> tightly coupled ... if we can't do a similar solution then we'd
> probably need to hack on the CMake program itsself and maybe fork it
> ... making it far more work to maintain than what we have now.

CMake doesn't integrate, it's put on top of makefiles. Creating
makefiles is just one of many options to build with CMake.

One disadvantage of GNUstep Make is, it uses a language (in form of
variables to be defined) which is used by GNUstep, only. automake or
CMake would help here extending the user base (10-fold?) if it's
possible to extend them to Obj-C _without_ adding more language.

Doesn't help with all the Xcode/CodeBlocks/Eclipse users, though,
because by default they invoke neither of GNUstep Make, automake or
CMake to build their stuff.


To sum up, I don't see a golden solution either. It's more like thinking
loudly.


Markus

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