GNUstep

[Scott Christley]

Greetings,

I'm new to Fedora and am interested in helping get GNUstep included  
into Fedora.  I'm one of the original developers of GNUstep but have  
long since moved up into user space, so I have the ulterior motive  
that I can get my own free software research tools (which depend on  
GNUstep) packaged into Fedora too some day!

Anyways, I discovered that the topic has come up recently and the  
discussion summarized in Fedora weekly news:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue140#GNUstep_Filesystem_Layout_Discussion

so I've read through the emails and tried as much as I could to  
understand the issues related to the GNUstep directory structure  
fitting with the FHS. I'm not an expert in FSH, so don't think I can  
say straight out what I think the best solution, but I offer some  
opinions.

Development using GNUstep can produce a number of different products,  
the core ones being:

tools
libraries
applications
frameworks
bundles

Now tools and libraries are well-known concepts, a tool is a command- 
line program typically self-contained, and a library is a binary  
object with some header files.  The other products are different in  
that they are wrappers for a directory structure and a set of files.   
Applications are graphical programs, frameworks are library wrappers  
and bundles are executable code to be dynamically loaded at runtime.   
They are wrappers because there are many files involved, take an  
application, beside the executable object it has files for GUI  
elements, configuration, localized strings, localized GUI elements,  
images, sounds, other media, etc. etc., all kinds of resources as they  
are called.  A sophisticated application could easily have hundreds of  
such resource files, frameworks and bundles can have any set of  
resources files as well.

So my suggestion would be:

* tools mostly but also sometimes libraries can have clear role  
outside GNUstep, so it is appropriate to treat them as such.  My  
suggestion would be FHS and flattened, so that they get install in  
expected places like ${_bindir} and %{_libdir}.

* let applications, frameworks and bundles live within the pure  
GNUstep layout.

I'm sure I didn't touch on many of the issues that were brought up, so  
I look forward to your comments!

cheers
Scott