Re: GNUstep and /usr/GNUstep...

[Gregor Hoffleit <flight@thefly.mathi.uni-heidelberg.de>]

You wrote:
    Hello,
    
    I'm currently packaging the GNUstep developement environment
    (primarily for my own use by now, but I may release it in
    experimental if some people are interested. However, the email I
    sent to the person listed as working on it in the WNPP bounced, so
    I may end up actually maintaining it <.

That's probably me. Where did you send the mail to ?

I had packaged a previous snapshot, but ran into similar problems. I came up with the issues on debian-policy, but got no responses. I second your observations: GNUstep is not compatible with FHS/FSSTND and it has good reasons to do so. Making it compliant with FSSTND is a major effort that tends to make GNUstep less attractive to developers.

Second, a main problem with the current snapshot is that it depends on non-free software: The dgs snapshot has portions licensed by Aladdin according to the Aladdin Public License (similary to gs-aladdin). Therefore, most of the gstep packages had to go into contrib (a little bit strange given this is an official GNU project). This should change in the near future when dgs-5.20 is released under the conditions of the GPL (a snapshot by Peter Deutsch already is in the hands of the developer core team).


Conclusion: I still feel responsible for packaging the GNUstep packages. Given the developer snapshot character of the current release, I don't know if there's a real use for those packages, and if it makes much sense to include them in Debian 2.0 in their current form. If you tell me so, I'd happily release packages of these snapshots in the next days.

	Gregor