[Debian GNUstep maintainers] GNUstep transition, orphaned packages, todo

[Yavor Doganov]

Federico Giménez Nieto wrote:
> > aclock.app
> > gridlock.app
> > talksoup.app
> > volumecontrol.app
> > zipper.app

> I could begin filling the ITA's for these on behalf of pkg-gnustep
> and working in some of them, perhaps in the new versions of AClock
> and Zipper.

Feel free to file ITAs.  AClock is ready, see aclock.app.git.  The
updated package is at mentors.d.n, waiting for a sponsor like the rest
of my packages...

I'm working on Gridlock now, it has a few issues.  Zipper has had new
releases at GAP so it is probably in a good shape.

Bite the bullet and take the hardest -- TalkSoup or VolumeControl :-)

> > We have to discuss and decide what to do with the GNUstep runtime.

> Please, share a link to the discussion thread when it will begin.

Well, I thought it would be better if we could share ideas here first.

As I see it, we could package the GNUstep runtime as libobjc2-4 (the
name doesn't matter much), but we have to rebuild everything with it
(making libgnustep-base-dev depend on libobjc2-dev), so that packages
link with the GNUstep runtime and not the GCC one.  But as the GNUstep
runtime has to be built with Clang, this means it won't be available
on many architectures.  I just tried, it builds with GCC, but the
testsuite doesn't build because it needs clang-specific flags.

Furthermore, the -dev package must conflict with GCC's libobjc-VER-dev
packages because they provide the same .so symlink.  Currently this
doesn't seem necessary, because libobjc2 uses cmake and it doesn't
support multiarch AFAICS, so it gets installed at /usr/lib/libobjc.so
while GCC's is at /usr/lib/*/libobjc.so.  If the -dev packages
conflict as they should, this means it won't be possible to use GCC to
build GNUstep stuff, even as a user.  That seems unthinkable.

Basically, a switch to the GNUstep runtime means to move away from GCC
and build everything with Clang.  This has already happened in the BSD
world.  Another concern is the Debian Release Team, they may have
legitimate objections too.

Perhaps I'm missing something.