If you are a Smalltalk developer who has never worked in Objective-C, you may want to look at GNUstep at GNUstep.org if only to see the Markup approach to UI’s found in Renaissance.
If you are on Win32, that may mean installing the Minimal GNU toolset or Mingw and run the Msys shell. You may also have to set the env vars CC and CPP to blank if then are set for anything other than gcc.
But even after you have run ./configure and
make
and
make install
you may have an exasperating moment where you ask yourself how to launch the thing…
The usual answer is to place yourself one directory below a directory with a name such as
SomeProject.app
and then run
openapp SomeProject.app
But to my consternation, while this runs fine on my laptop, on my boat anchor it gives a less than informative error about
could not find /gnustep-install-dir … executable/script
The answer ?
openapp ./SomeProject.app
You will almost certainly want to install the ProjectCenter application even with its occasional fatal bugs ( there is bug reporting at the GNU Savannah project ) and the Graphical Object Relationship Modeller (GORM) tool which is the new Interface Builder.
And with applications, if all else fails you can enter the directory and run the name EXE file – provided that you are in an Msys session configured to run GNUstep.
If you make Renaissance, you may have to make some little adjustments.
Start with the GNUstep Msys session.
cd to the Renaissance install.
You will be using Msys make and there is no ./configure to run.
But it may fail even if you set INCLUDE and LIB sensibly. I simply copied
GNUstep.h
from ./Source to ./Source/Markup
When make got down to the Tools build, it failed again. No settings of PATH or LIB helped, so I set the ./Tools GNUmakefile to read
GSMarkupBrowser_GUI_LIBS +=
-L../Source/shared_ob/Renaissance
GSMarkupLocalizableStrings_GUI_LIBS +=
-L../Source/shared_ob/Renaissance
Then make and make install ran clean.
Enjoy!
