In this circumstance, I would replace GNUstep with Apple's CoreFoundation (it's open, despite branded with Apple) and lay Cocotron on it, then use GNUstep to provide everything that is missing. Cocotron is an implementation of Foundation (GNUstep Base) using open sourced code and based on Apple's CoreFoundation. It will be less effort to do that if you are using FreeBSD. I have Linux so it is a lot more work to do.
thanks for the advice, but I'll stay with GNUstep (for personal reasons). IMO CoreFoundation is a giant mistake anyways, so I'm not too keen on getting that working (on FreeBSD) anyways.
I've just posted my findings on the current GNUstep corebase issues to let others on this list know about them, ideally before they waste too much time on the same problems as I did. Don't get me wrong: I appreciate the work Stefan Bidi did with GNUstep corebase, but, as I already said, I'm not very eager to spend much time to help improve the current codebase.
smime.p7s