Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 17 Feb 2007, at 02:11, Matt Rice wrote:

> On 2/16/07, Nicola Pero <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Matt, thanks for your comments.
> >
> > I understand your desire to centralize the configuration, but there
> > is an actual reason why GNUstep.sh is a pure shell script. ;-)
> >
> > It's a machine-independent program that can be in a machine- 
> > independent
> > directory
> > and that can then be used to bootstrap the fat binary system. :-)
>
> Yes, my take is, people using weird configurations should not mind  
> doing
> weird things GNUstep.sh can still set up the achitecture specific
> environment variables
> for 'step-config' to then use.
> non-flattened configurations must then continue sourcing GNUstep.sh.

I feel very strongly that that is the wrong philosophy ... while we  
obviously need to devote most attention to the needs of the majority,  
we should also try to make things easy for the minorities, and  
changes that make things harder for the minorities (or needlessly  
different for different groups) really need very good justification.   
I'm also pretty dismayed by the cavalier attitude towards portability  
(cross platform support) that I've seen in this thread.

While the initial points raised about previously missing features in  
gnustep-make (needing to set a variable to locate the make system and  
the lack of a facility to report on the presence of libraries for use  
in autoconf/configure) were quite valid,  the desire to solve them in  
ways which don't benefit all developers/setups equally seems very  
much mistaken.  Where something needs improving, let's do it for  
everyone.