Re: Forwarded message: Thinking about GNUstep !

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Thursday, March 29, 2001, at 01:21 PM, Manuel Guesdon wrote:

>  
> From: Christian Schulte <schulte@contentgate.com> 
> Date: Thu Mar 29, 2001  01:11:48 PM Europe/London 
> To: gnustep-maintainers@gnustep.org 
> Subject: Thinking about GNUstep ! 
> >From Manu  Thu Mar 29 14: 15:01 2001 
> Delivered-To: manu@localhost.sbuilders.com 
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>  
> Hi there ! 
>  
> I really have some questions about GNUstep. 
> (I think there will be many people who asked the same allready but I did  
> not find a statement) 
>  
> Does it get supported anymore ? 

I'm surprised at this question ... I would have thought that the big links to
'New Releases' and 'News for week ending March 24' on the website would be
answer enough!
GNUstep is being actively developed.

> I really would like to develope Apps with GNUstep but I even can't  
> install it on my linux machine after downloading everything. I can  
> compile all except the gui, guile examples and xgps....base make and  
> libobj work! 

It should all work ... If you have a RedHat-6.? system or similar, try 
downloading
the RPMs.  But in general, buyilding should be pretty easy ... if you follow the
instructions in the HOWTO.
 
> Is there a HOWTO which does not only say compile all the packages  
> above....because this does not work. 

The HOWTO on the website should be accurate. It tells you what to install, and 
in
what order to install ... you should be fine if you read it fully and follow
instructions exactly.  The most common problem seems to be forgetting to do
'. /usr/GNUstep/System/Makefiles/GNUstep.sh'

> The other thing is about the MacOS X compatibility. 
> The links to the Apple developer site on www.gnustep.org link to apple  
> but there is only mentioned that NeXT products are no longer supported..... 
>  
> SO: 
>  
> Do Apps written with GNUstep easily compile on MacOS-X ? 

Yes.  You can use GNUstep specific extensions (and decrease portability), or you
can set a preprocessor flag to enforce strict compatibility.

> Is it worth getting into GNUstep and no waste of time because of not  
> beeing supported any more ? 

Where do you get that idea?

> Do GNUstep Apps run without GNUstep on KDE or GNOME or even twm ? 

No (unless static linked) ... GNUstep apps normally require the GNUstep shared
libraries, and generally need some support tools and daemons for certain 
networking
capabilities.

> Should I begin learning more about GNUstep or just use qt-lib and forget  
> about all that here ? 

Whichever.  Obviously I prefer GNUstep, but realistically, for a GUI app, you 
have a
greater audiance for a qt application, and a more stable (though IMO inferior) 
set of
technology.

For non-gui applications, I do not believe you can get a better set of 
development
libraries than gnustep-base with gnustep-make (and JIGS if you want to program 
in Java
or use Java libraries), and while I have no personal experience of gs-web, I've 
heard
nothing but good about it.