Re: Your patch: don't configure libobjc on Darwin

[David Ayers <d dot ayers at inode dot at>]

Stan Shebs wrote:

> Ziemowit Laski wrote:
>
> > On Friday, Jul 18, 2003, at 11:46 US/Pacific, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >
> > > Nicola Pero wrote:
> > >
> > > > It seems to me that you have applied a radical patch causing a major
> > > > regression (since the GNU Objective-C runtime was available on 
> > > > Darwin in
> > > > all previous releases of GCC, and is no longer available now) just 
> > > > because
> > > > you don't want to spend twenty minutes figuring out how to install 
> > > > both
> > > > runtimes together on darwin and switch safely between the two.  I'm 
> > > > afraid
> > > > you'll have to fix your laziness, or revert your damaging patch.
> > > It's a bit more than a 20-minute job I'm afraid, because on Darwin
> > > both the NeXT and GNU libraries and headers are mutually exclusive
> > > and will try to override each other in bad ways.  I poked at this
> > > very issue a couple years ago, and it took about 20 minutes :-) to
> > > learn the full nastiness of the problem; for instance, dealing with
> > > conflicting headers would probably require significant fixincludes
> > > hacking, so that you don't get disasterized by seeing NeXT headers
> > > when compiling with -fgnu-runtime.
> >
> > Why not pick a separate location for the (GNU) ObjC headers to be 
> > installed,
> > and then have the compiler search in it iff -fgnu-runtime is specified
> > (explicitly or implicitly) before it looks into /usr/include?
>
>
> Hmm, that sounds like a good idea, sort of like how libstdc++ headers
> go into a special place now.


First of all, let me point out that Nicola's suggestion "to spend twenty 
minutes figuring out how to install both runtimes together on darwin and 
switch safely between the two" falls exactly into this typ of approach.  
No one insinuated that both sets of headers should be reachable in all 
cases.

Eventhough the suggestion to install the GNU runtime headers in a 
different location will solve the technical problem, I still think the 
priorities are a bit distorted.  Instead of installing the free GNU 
runtime headers into a special directory which will require extra -I 
flags, I think the NeXT runtime headers should be located there.  I'm 
don't think the gcj java runtime maintainers would prefer a different 
runtime to thiers either.  I think Nicola has a very valid point.  The 
GNU ObjC runtime should be the default of the FSF GCC.  Of course Apple 
will be free to do as they like with the GCC that they deliver.  I could 
imagine a configure option which indicates which runtime headers get 
installed in a special place.

If no one is willing to do this, my offer stands.

Cheer,
David