[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Next GNUstep problem BioCocoa.app

[Hubert Chathi]

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 07:44:33 +0100 (CET), Andreas Tille <tillea at rki.de> said:

> On Tue, 11 Mar 2008, Yavor Doganov wrote:

[...]

>> If you plan to generate a tarball yourself, you must write a
>> GNUmakefile (and maintain it yourself if upstream doesn't plan to
>> support GNUstep).  Of course this is a prerequisite to build the app.
>> That's the easy part, even if you have to go with several makefiles.

This will most likely be easy.  There should be someone on the GNUstep
maintainers list to help with this, if you need to understand how to
construct a working GNUmakefile.

>> Also, probably you'll have to convert the .nib files to .gorm (with
>> gorm.app); maintaining them is a huge pain from Debian's point of
>> view since they're binary.

GNUstep has some .nib loading capabilities, but I don't know how good
they are.  So this may or may not be necessary.

If you had to do this, this would probably be a big pain.

NIB is the interface definition files format.  Think something like
GNOME's glade.

>> If upstream didn't resist the temptation to use classes that are not
>> available on GNUstep, you'll have to port the app by rewriting those
>> parts (sometimes this is not trivial at all).

Yes, this could be anywhere from very easy, or extremely difficult.

> OK.  So I would decide to provide a stable maintained version 1.6
> inside Debian, see how hardly users want this and bother upstream in
> case there is a real need for it.  What do you think?

This is probably a reasonable approach.  If there's no demand for it,
there's no point in going through the work.

-- 
Hubert Chathi <uhoreg at debian.org> -- Jabber: hubert at uhoreg.ca
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