Re: What's the new direction?

[David Chisnall]

On 22 Dec 2013, at 17:56, Jamie Ramone <sancombru@gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't think there's a lack of need. Just look at how many people have been 
> asking for help on this issue lately. Every time I see them the reply is 
> usually "why would you or anyone want to do that?" Testing some software 
> they're developing in Cocoa on GNUstep without the need of a VM as you said 
> is just one example. They could want to do that to make sure it'll work 
> properly on non-Mac systems. Or to move away from it. Or because of an issue 
> with proprietary software, whether ideologically or practically inclined 
> (e.g. licensing issue of some kind). In any case all those replies DO 
> suggests reluctance, which is why I said what I said.

Ivan said a lack of need from GNUstep developers, and he's mostly right because 
most of us develop in some VM or on native non-Mac platforms.

I definitely agree that there's a need to gave GNUstep working on OS X, 
however, to ease porting.  I'd love it if we could ship and XCode plugin that 
would let people test their code with OS X in XQuartz and then just recompile 
on FreeBSD[1].  It would also be nice if we could bundle WINE and provide an 
environment for testing Windows builds.  Now that Apple is shipping a recent 
clang, it's easy to cross compile, you just need a sysroot with the relevant 
libraries / headers and a GNU ld for the target platform.

Obviously, for real deployment, you're going to want to set up a VM (or a real 
machine) with the target platform and do QA there, but having to sync the code 
between the Mac and the VM seems to be too much of a barrier for some people.  

David

[1] On Linux they'll need to also port to glibc most likely.