#1006 FisicaLab: educational application to physic

[Germán Arias]

Hi, I'm the developer of FisicaLab. This is an educational aplication to solve physic problems. This app is made with GNUstep. However, there is a package of FísicaLab ported to Cocoa. To build FisicaLab is necessary.

* gnustep-make: just to build the app.
* renaissance.
* GSL libraries.

The information of installation on Mac is available at website:

http://www.nongnu.org/fisicalab/

[K.-M. Schindler]

I might be able to package it, but there need to be a sourcecode archive for Mac OS X, which does not seem to be the case for version 0.21. Bug me once it is ready.

[Germán Arias]

Sorry for the delay, I was busy. I uploaded a FisicaLab-Mac-0.2.1 package at:

http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/fisicalab/

I could not tested it on a Mac (I don't have a Mac). But I hope it is OK. However, I will appreciate if you can do some basic tests:

* Check if info panel show the info (as I know, there are a small difference between plist files in gnustep and mac, but I don't expect a problem here).
* Check if Help panel works fine.
* Solve a simple problem to see if this works as expected.

If all is OK, I will appreciate if you can send me a couple of screenshots to put these at website. Thanks in advance.

[K.-M. Schindler]

Hi,

Thanks for making the source code available. The next step is the availability of the parts fisicalab depends on. gsl should be fine, since it is already a fink package. However, gnustep-make and renaissance are not available as fink package, yet. So, they need to be packaged first. One problem is, that fink is not supposed to install anything outside its directory tree (i.e. /sw); definitely not in /Library/Makefiles. Windowmaker is packaged with "--with-gnustepdir=%p/lib/GNUstep \". Also fink packages cannot use svn repositories, because the validity of the source code is checked versus its checksum. But I saw that renaissance has a fixed release version (0.9.0), but i haven't checked, whether this works. Resolving some of these issues would speed up making the package, but if this is not possible, it is just a matter of time.

Michael.

[Alexander Hansen]

It's worth pointing out that it's possible in Fink to patch from a release to a svn revision, if that's necessary, but it's illegal to do this after the download phase because the build process isn't supposed to need network access--for security.

The normal way we currently handle such situations is to have a tarball of the SVN checkout of a defined revision (or of a diff between that defined revision and the latest full release) to be posted online somewhere. That way we can be reasonably sure of the file contents.

[Germán Arias]

The gnustep-make package is not a prerequisite. This is necesary just for build the application. In theory is possible build the app from Xcode, adding all the files and setting the correct flags. So, in this way you don't need gnustep-make.

In the case of Renaissance, unfortunately this is necessary because the plugin to convert .gorm files to .nib files don't work in my case (maybe because the inteface is too complex). But in next weeks I will re-implement the inteface to do this more easy to maintain. With more simple .gorm files, maybe the plugin to convert to .nib files can work. If so, I can provide .nib files to Mac. And Renaissance would not be more a requisite.

[Germán Arias]

I suppose you can configure where install gnustep-make. I copied the instructions from other package that uses Renaissance. Because I don't have a Mac to test it.

[Germán Arias]

I updated the package, because I received feedback of some problems.