tools-make/Documentation/README.Cygwin

Date:	17-Sep-2002 (tested under windows-xp)
Author: Ildar Mulyukov <ildar@users.sourceforge.net>

PURPOSE
-------

This document may be treated as just an appendix to GNUstep-HOWTO. You
can find GNUstep-HOWTO link here:
http://gnustep.org/experience/documentation.html

This document is intended to provide a step by step instruction on how
to get the GNUstep base library into a usable state on a recent windows
operating system (XP, 2000, and probably NT) within Cygwin environment.

Cygwin is unix-like environment working on top of Win32 (Windows, Windows 
NT/2k/XP). You can find complete information about it on the website
http://cygwin.org

For the moment GNUstep can be built with GUI support. (Native Win32
GUI, not X11) The gui library is only partially ported to run under
Win32 API so be warned.

Generally Cygwin port of GNUstep has a lot of issues and therefore is not 
suitable for end-users yet but only for [experienced] programmers.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
-------------------

Note: These comments are just my experience. You don't need these to build 
GNUstep. If you don't understand something don't worry.

Cygwin project is now in a very advanced stage. It's ready to be used by 
end-users and in commercial purposes and very convenient for programmers.

Cygwin provides "General UNIX" environment and APIs. In fact
GNUstep-base is compiled using Unix alternatives of classes (like
NSConcreteUnixTask). But it has several particularities that must been
taken into consideration. There is a very good documentation on Cygwin
website on these questions. See e.g.
http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/cygwin-ug-net.html I would like to
mention two of them:

1. Filesystem is case-insensitive. Now it's (luckily) supports
soft-links. But case-insensitivity hinders quite a lot.

2. Dynamic libraries mechanism is not so good. (Windows DLL). It does
not support several features (and this makes so hard to port some
software e.g. licq) And it has those ugly __declspec(dllexport) /
__declspec(dllimport) . But (Cygwin hackers are just cool!) in later
releases of binutils ld is capable to link wrongly declared exports!
This eliminates a lot of problems when dealing with DLLs (including
objc.dll and gnustep-*.dll)

PRELIMINARIES
-------------

Before you start, you need Cygwin in some programming-oriented
configuration (full configuration is OK but it's VERY big
now). Installation instructions are on Cygwin site.

In fact Cygwin already contains every package needed for GNUstep
except GCC and GDB. Please see below.

Building GCC and GDB
--------------------

Cygwin contains it's own GCC and GDB packages that work very good in Cygwin 
environment. But they lack Objective-C language support so for us these are
completely unusable. See http://cygwin.com/faq/faq_4.html#SEC90

So you have to build these two from sources.

Please note that generally GDB is optional! It's up to you whether to
use it or not. If you don't use it you don't need to build it.

1. GCC. Get sources from http://gcc.gnu.org . I suggest version 2.xx.x
(last stable in gcc-2 branch e.g. 2.95.3) because gnustep-objc suits
to version 2 of GCC. Get sources (including languages you need),
unpack, build. Before installing uninstall previous version of GCC via
setup.exe program.  

Note: GCC provided in Cygwin was patched to behave better in
Windows/Cygwin environment. Cygwin team has done some changes that
were not committed to GCC CVS tree and they lost Objective-C
support. That's why you can't use even Cygwin GCC source. But don't
worry: newly built GCC works fine and I believe can do all those
"-mno-cygwin" and "-shared" things by fixing specs file.  

Note2: You can make packages from programs you built with utility
provided in APPENDIX A. These packages can be installed with setup.exe

2. GDB. Sources are here: http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/ . See
http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/discuss-gnustep/2002-August/017238.html
Adam Fedor has made wonderful patch for current CVS GDB. It's probable
that you may use Cygwin GDB sources but I don't know really. Unpack,
apply patch, make, install. This may be non-trivial. Good luck.

Obtaining GNUstep
-----------------

The main GNUstep project pages tell you how to get hold of this. You
can get the latest release of the following libraries. However, since
Cygwin support is currently evolving, I recommend that you get the
latest snapshot or code from CVS.

You need things in the following order:

GNUstep-make (release, snapshot, or cvs core module)
libffcall (http://ftp.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/lib)
GNUstep-libobjc (release, snapshot, or cvs dev-apps module)
GNUstep-base (snapshot, or cvs core module)

For gui ... GNUstep-gui and GNUstep-back (snapshot, or cvs core module)




Building and installing libraries
---------------------------------

FFCALL: Unpack, configure, make, make install. See GNUstep-HOWTO for details.
Note again: you can make package. See APPENDIX A

libiconv, libtiff, libjpeg, zlib, libxml2 and openssl are all in
Cygwin distro.  Don't forget to install respective *-devel packages.


Building and installing gnustep-make
------------------------------------

As ususal. E.g. I use ../clear.cvs/gnustep/core/make/configure
--prefix=/usr/GNUstep --with-thread-lib=-lkernel32 && make && make
install

Building and installing libobjc
-------------------------------

You need to install gnustep-objc as it properly exports symbols for
DLLs and it's DLL (I don't know whether it works OK in static form)

Go to gnustep-objc (or from CVS, into dev-apps/libobjc), and type

  make install

This should build and install the ObjectiveC runtime and headers for you.
Note: I strongly suggest removing gcc's own objc/*.h and libobjc.a files.


Building and installing GNUstep-base
------------------------------------

Go to gnustep-base (or from CVS into the core/base directory), and type

  make install

This should automatically run the configure script for you, build the
base library and some tools, and install the whole lot (along with some
system resources).



Building and installing GNUstep-gui
-----------------------------------

To build the gui, you need to have libtiff installed ...

Go to gnustep-gui (or from CVS into the core/gui directory), and type

  make install




Building and installing GNUstep-back
------------------------------------

This software is PRE-ALPHA ... it is present in CVS for people who which to
help porting the GNUstep backend to windows!

In the back directory, type

  make install




Troubleshooting
---------------

Pre-Compiled Binaries
---------------------

I don't currently know about any resource. I have ones but don't have
a place to put them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
---------------

Thanks to all the GNUstep hackers for this wonderful project.  Thanks
to Richard Frith-Macdonald <rfm@gnu.org> for his README.MinGW as I
have copy-pasted structure of this document from his README.MinGW


APPENDIX A
----------

This is mkpkg.sh script for making packages from sources.

#!/bin/bash
# make a cygwin package
#   launch this script in the building dir

TMPDIR=/tmp/__TMP_$RANDOM
FLIST=$TMPDIR/files.list

rm -rf $TMPDIR
mkdir $TMPDIR

touch /usr/time.stamp
make install

pushd .
cd /
find usr ! -type d -newer /usr/time.stamp > $FLIST
rm /usr/time.stamp

# Don't forget to rename it to real package name
tar cjf $TMPDIR/package.tar.bz2 `cat $FLIST`
popd

unset TMPDIR FLIST

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