Re: [Pyobjc-dev] GNUstep support

[Ronald O. <ous...@ci...>]

On Tuesday, 8 July, 2003, at 22:34, David Bishop wrote:

> Going with the assumption that I will get PyObjC working decently on 
> my laptop
> (can't try out the suggestions until tonight), I'm now trying to get 
> it up
> and going on my linux box.

There is little change that you'll get the Linux part to work without a 
lot of work, the issue below is just the first and easiest problem. We 
currently do not support GNUstep and the code will not compile on 
GNUstep systems. Getting it to work requires writing some low-level 
functions to interface with the Objective-C runtime for GNUstep 
(actually the GNU runtime for Objective-C, as opposed to the Apple/NeXT 
one on MacOS X). While I'd like to have GNUstep support I currently 
don't care enough to perform the port myself, but enough to not rip the 
partial GNUstep support out.

>
> After installing the python-dev packages, running python setup.py 
> --help
> produced the following:
>
> <snip build of libffi that worked>
> Performing task: Generating wrappers & stubs
> sh: line 1: /usr/bin/sw_vers: No such file or directory
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "Scripts/CodeGenerators/cocoa_generator.py", line 32, in ?
>     VER = '.'.join(VER.split('.')[:2])
> AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'split'
> Task 'Generating wrappers & stubs' failed [256]

The easiest way to work around this problem is to modify setup.py and 
make sure it doesn't call this script when on a GNUstep system. We have 
some (old) wrappers for the AppKit and Foundation frameworks that 
should work on GNUstep and those will automaticly be picked up when 
compiling the bridge.

>
> Now, 'locate sw_vers' produced nothing, as did 'apt-cache search 
> sw_vers', so
> I went to Google.  Every hit on sw_vers had to do with OSX, so can I 
> safely
> assume that it is not available in linux/GNUstep?  Maybe (really 
> reading
> between the lines here), it should be calling uname instead?  I *did* 
> read
> somewhere (in a changelog? maybe?) that GNUstep support was being 
> removed
> until a volunteer was found, so if necessary, take this as me stepping
> forward...

sw_vers is an OSX tool that solves the problem that 'uname -a' doesn't 
show usefull version information on OSX machines. Just like on Linux 
machines 'uname' shows the kernel version, which has no documented 
relation to the OS release.

Our non-support for GNUstep is prominently featured on the website. 
IMHO the best way to proceed with a port to GNUstep would be to ignore 
the 'cocoa_generator.py' issues for now and try to get the core going 
first. This requires the implementation of a number of functions, IIRC 
in class-builder.m and objc_support.m. Some OSX-specific stuff may have 
crept into the code, that would require fixing as well.

Good luck,
	Ronald