Re: Fire and GNUstep

Let me de-lurk for a few things...

Jason Townsend wrote:

> On Nov 24, 2004, at 10:27 PM, Emmanuel A. Garcia wrote:
>
>> I'm a long time Mac user, but I moved away from home and now I 
>> solely  use my FreeBSD machine. I was wondering, since Fire was 
>> originally  developed on OpenStep. Does anyone know if Fire could be 
>> built on  GNUstep?
>
>
> There's a feature request on this here:
>
> [ 829140 ] Porting to GNUstep?
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? 
> func=detail&aid=829140&group_id=33772&atid=409173
>
> All current active Fire development team members are focused on Mac 
> OS  X as the target platform. This might be possible to do, although 
> there  are a few caveats:
>
> 1) Fire depends on more than just AppKit and Foundation... there is 
> at  least one use of Carbon as well as Keychain, WebKit, CFNetwork, etc.

There's a quasi-functional WebKit for GNUstep which was ported from the 
apple code. Read below for why it's not complete...

> 2) Fire uses Objective C++ fairly extensively for some of the service  
> plug-ins, for example MSN and ICQ.

ObjC++ will be in GCC 4.0, the next release of GCC (There will not be a 
released GCC 3.5/3.6). This should be released within the first half of 
next year, or perhaps even sooner.

> 3) Fire uses Xcode as its build system so a Makefile would need to be  
> created to build on FreeBSD or Linux.

Trivial. See below.

> It would theoretically be possible to port to GNUstep, assuming the  
> issues above were addressed (by reimplementing the relevant code or  
> just removing a feature such as WebStyles entirely). As far as I know  
> no one is working on this at the moment, and it's certainly nontrivial.

Yes, the ancillary features are easy to strip out. I have a 
compiling-under-gnustep Adium checkout from a month or two ago.

>
> We'd be happy to take patches/#ifdef's/Makefile/etc. into the main 
> tree  if someone stepped up to do the port, and then continue to 
> maintain it  as Fire, Mac OS X, and GNUstep change.

GNUstep uses an extension to GNU Make which makes it trivial to write 
rather complex makefiles. GNUstep itself uses it to compile, and it's 
very small and compact.



-------------------------------------------------------
SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide
Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users.
Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. 
http://productguide.itmanagersjournal.com/