Thu 18 Feb 2010 09:57:37 AM UTC, original submission:
Hey, all.
I'm going to preface this bug report by expressing some disappointment in this project as a whole. Dealing with GNUstep has been the absolute most frustrating experience I have had dealing with software - free or otherwise, ever. Each experience below takes a sentence or two; in reality, they each represent hours of wasted time as dependencies take time to build, things have to be downloaded, makefiles need to be tweaked, etc.
I tried installing GNUstep in Snow Leopard, ran into some errors. I was told it won't compile in Snow Leopard (#28862) and to try MacPorts. He was right, it built. It installed! But guess what? Nothing runs - dylibs are allegedly missing, dylibs that exist (gnustep-gui and base, both of which just finished building).
Undeterred, but not wanting to bother the list, I turn to my Leopard machine. Go straight to MacPorts. Same thing, installs but there's problems with apps. ProjectCenter will build, but it can't find its framework bundle. When that's taken care of, the missing dylib errors from Snow Leopard manifest.
Fine. I decide to try it without MacPorts - I leave it installed since nothing can find it anyways. Time for `gnustep-startup-0.23`. Download, run `InstallGNUstep`. Fails on obj/make_strings.m: "nested functions are disabled". That sounds like something I could fix in Xcode's Build Info, but I have no idea where in this project to specify that. It doesn't bother me at that IDEs have made me stupid with `gcc`; this is supposed to be for end users, and it fails.
I'm giving up on installing it in Mac OS X for now; it was nothing more than curiosity about the project. There's a third Mac, but it's running Tiger. MacPorts takes hours to build the dependencies for GNUstep, and I'm deciding that I don't want to endure that a third time.
Remembering I have a Windows-using computer in my closet, I pull it out, fire it up and VNC into it. I run the installers (system, core, devel, gorm) on the Windows downloads page - painless. Run Gorm, it's up and it looks like IB does when I run it in VMWare with either NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP! Since it's useless on its own, I download and install ProjectCenter so I can try them both out.
Guess what? It fails. It's looking for gnustep-base-dll version 18 and gnustep-gui-dll version 16. Your installers gave me versions 19 and 17, respectively. I have libraries newer than required, and it refuses to run. What is that about?!
Fine, whatever. I make duplicates of each and rename them to the version numbers needed. Now the program is just crashing on launch. Understandable; time to move on.
I uninstall ProjectCenter and check out the trunk. Let's try this method. It builds. Let's launch it. It fails; this time it wants something called projectcenter-0-dll or something. This is getting ridiculous.
I'm not familiar with Windows. Where can I get the failure logs so I can attach them? It's Windows XP 2002 SP 3; uname is MING32_NT_51.
Since Mac OS X is a *step based environment anyways, I'm not going to pursue the earlier problems. I would, however, like to be able to recommend GNUstep to non-Mac owning friends and colleagues who express an interest in Objective-C, so I would like to be able to get ProjectCenter up and running in Windows. Where can I find the Windows log files so I can attach them for you?
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