Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Nicola Pero]

(discussion about how to get the compile/link flags out of gnustep-make)

> That's the kind of functionality we need and a usage style familiar to users 
> of pkg-config (and convenient for use with the autoconf macros).  Another  
> option is to just use pkg-config and bundle it with gnustep-make so  
> that the gnustep-make installation process guarantees the presence of  
> pgk-config, installing it if necessary.

pkg-config works best if compile/link flags are fixed and listed in a file.

The compile/link flags in gnustep-make are determined dynamically instead, they 
are not fixed.
You can have non-flattened multi-platform installations that are mounted from 
the 
network; the same gnustep-make will then use different compilation flags/tools 
for the different hosts (keep in mind that each host might also have a different
filesystem configuration, eg, they could be sharing a network-mounted System 
domain,
while having different domains in different locations).  Or, more commonly, even
in a flattened system, each user can organize their own user domain however 
they want, 
and control it via the GNUstep user config file (that's great for testing 
various versions
of your own GNUstep lib/app without messing up your system).  So, every user 
should 
get a different list of -I and -L flags to lookup things in their user domain - 
in whatever
way it is currently configured in their user config file.

That's for the general flags to compile/link a tool or an application, which 
are the only 
ones which are not trivial; all the other flags are trivial (that is, -llibrary 
to link 
against library) and to get them you don't need pkg-config and you don't need 
gnustep-make.

The easier way to have gnustep-config output the right flags that you should use
for compiling/linking a tool against gnustep-base/gnustep-gui seems to be to
have gnustep-config do a quick gnustep-make run in the background asking it to 
determine 
the right flags, and return them.  That's my current plan.

I don't see any easy solution with pkg-config unless we rewrite large parts of 
gnustep-make.

If the syntax of gnustep-config is reasonably similar to the pkg-config one, 
there shouldn't
be much difference though. :-)

Thanks

PS: Building a bundle or a framework (or even an app) will always be very 
troublesome without
gnustep-make because it's not just a matter of a couple of compile/link flags.  
I think
what we hope to achieve is something more limited, which is that you can easily 
get the flags 
to compile an ObjC file and to link a program against gnustep-base and 
gnustep-gui.