> On Nov 25, 2019, at 12:07, Andreas Fink <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 25 Nov 2019, at 14:37, Yavor Doganov <[email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >> >> Gregory Casamento wrote: >>> On Fri, Nov 22, 2019 at 3:01 PM Yavor Doganov <[email protected] >>> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >>>> The answer is simple: because there's a lot to lose and nothing to >>>> gain. >> >>> This is patently incorrect. The gain is time and compatibility with >>> the latest code base. I laid out the advantages and disadvantages >>> of this in my previous posting. >> >> There are no advantages for the current GNUstep packages in Debian >> which is the main point I was trying to make. I don't dispute the >> fact that dropping support for GCC will simplify things a lot for >> you. At certain cost, of course, which you consider negligible. >> >>> * More Applications, more applications means more end users (sort of >>> chicken and egg thing) >> >> That's purely hypothetical to the extent of being mere speculation. >> GNUstep supports Clang and David's runtime for quite some time now, >> why there are no more applications? Why existing GNUstep applications >> have not been updated to take advantage of the new features? > > I can tell you exactly why. When I tried out GNUstep for the first time to > port my OS X apps to Debian, I simply did "apt-get install gnustep" and > wanted to compile my code and nothing really worked. > Then it took me several weeks to figure out how to get a working toolchain > with libobjc2 and ARC support which my code required. And I am not a newbie. > I write code on MacOS since 1994 and Linux since like 1992. The major > roadblocks where: > > a) the tools which come with Debian where totally useless as it did not > support modern Objc2 features which my ported code was using already. And it > took a while to even figure that out. > b) the build process is not well documented. You find all kinds of build info > out there in the net out of which most are totally outdated and don't work > anymore. (this has become a bit better since). > c) there where some bugs, especially in the linking part which where totally > throwing you off the rails and where giving very puzzling information. > d) if you don't pay attention, the old runtime libobjc which comes with gcc > gets into your way. And the package is named libobjc4. So go figure that > libobjc2 is actually newer... > > I can assure you that people who are used to MacOS X and Xcode , 99% of it > will run away. They will simply claim GnuStep is not a mature project.
I absolutely agree. Either gnustep in the repo should be up to date with clang, or there should be a PPA. I understand the later is a pain, but the question is not how hard is it but is it worth it to get a better adoption. When I discovered GNUstep to utilize Objective-C on non-Mac platforms I was shocked at how hard it was to set up right. The Ubuntu package was old and didn’t support Objective-C 2.0. And trying to get it working on Objective-C was a pain. I updated the script on the Wiki and there was a bunch of steps. Honestly while I follow along with the project, I don’t do much with it because its so hard to install. -Matt
