Re: building gnustep on Darwin

[Bill Northcott]

> > I'm wondering a bit about how essentials are the gnu binutils
> > to build gnustep on darwin, because I'm having much trouble with
> > it.
> > The ranlib included in binutils does not recognize the format
> > of the static archives built, while the system ranlib does.
> >
> > The configure script also does not build shared libraries.
> >
> > In other words, must I "go through all this" or could the
> > system tools be ok ?

> On Darwin, all you need is the FSF gcc. Everything else can be standard
> Darwin stuff. See
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnustep/information/machines_1.html#SEC2

Recently Apple fed a lot of their compiler stuff beck into the FSF cvs. 
This created a problem when -fgnu-runtime was used which was fixed by 
Andrew Pinksi.  See this bug report 
<http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11754>.

If you apply the tiny patch in that bug report to the Apple sources, I 
think you can build an Apple style compiler which will build GNUstep.  It 
certainly produces a compiler which will build Swarm.  You can find this 
compiler built from pre-release Panther sources with the patch at the 
Swarm Savannah site:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/swarm. 
It is packaged as an OS X installer, but you can probably use pax to 
install it on a Darwin system. Obviously if you want an x86 Darwin 
compiler, you will need to build it - use the panther-release-branch from 
Apple's sources and apply the patch.  You need that branch because it 
contains another important fix Apple made in June.

I would really like to know if this compiler does build GNUstep.  I think 
it should.  It is considerably faster than the FSF version and of course 
it integrates with other Apple/Darwin tools.

Bill Northcott