[Pyobjc-dev] GNUstep support

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

About a month ago PyObjC did built correctly on my Linux/ix86 system 
with GNUstep and it did pass most, if not all, unittests. It did not 
yet support AppKit because the Linux machine is a headless server 
without the X11 libraries.

I therefore updated the website to say that PyObjC works on GNUstep 
systems. ... only to discover that it no longer works... one of the 
updates to the linux machine completely broke PyObjC just now that I 
found an old box where I could install the GUI part of GNUstep :-(

There are two serious problems w.r.t. supporting GNUstep:

1. The only reason I work on GNUstep support at all is that I seriously 
believe that porting software to other platforms improves its quality. 
Porting to GNUstep already helped finding a number of bugs in the 
generic part of PyObjC. However, I don't use GNUstep myself and am 
therefore not terribly motivated to work on this.

2. The GNU Objective-C runtime is not well suited for the kind of 
things we do (such as creating new classes at runtime instead of 
loading dynamic libraries containing classes). I'm currently using some 
private functions to add new classes because the GNU runtime does not 
have a public API to do this, and that's probably what broke PyObjC.

The combination of these two items mean that GNUstep support will 
forever be lacking unless someone is willing to work on this.

Ronald

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