FreeBSD version

[sgharms]

Thanks

While I'm messing with trying to get this working, I just wanted to say that I love the project. I loved the early days of OSX development and when I saw just how close it was to Openstep, I became a big fan of Openstep as well.

I've been trying to recreate that look, feel, and focused environment of Openstep ever since. Invariably little bits wouldn't work, or would clash with windowmaker (looks at GWorkspace) etc. But here you've given us a NeXT-y workspace and the Gnustep tools for building apps. It's an amazing thing -- especially as Windows, and Mac user experiences seem fixated on enshittifying and stuffing ads and other nonsense everywhere. Ugh. Nextspace, instead, is a wonderful oasis.

FreeBSD

Ironically, despite the fact that OSX and NeXTSTEP were both built on BSD, I'm sad that the awesome nextspace doesn't install on FreeBSD.

I am not up to your superior-mode C (and the entire toolchain), but I am doing decently decoding and modifying the installer scripts. I am poking along and getting better along the way. I do have a healthy facility with shell scripts, so I've been able to digest the installer scripts and figure out what's going on.

In any case, I'm going to try to get an installer working here and I'm saying it publicly in case there are any other interested parties. I'll not be fast with it, but I am going to attempt to get this working.

Status

FWIW, I'm stuck trying to get CFNetwork installed. There's no support for FreeBSD there, so I'm trying to figure out how to handle the ifdefs and get back to parity. It's interesting and tractable, but I'm slow. I'm going to take a slightly different stab at an installer that leverages more of the FreeBSD ports infrastructure and then try to bolt on your config and apps and see if that provides an interim build as a workaround -- and then I can circle back and iterate on the lovely "sealed" approach you've taken in the installer scripts.

Closing

Big note, thanks. I'm so glad that this project exists. It's a light. If we can figure out how to get more people and building GNUstep apps, maybe there's a way to a better desktop ahead for all of us. Be well!

[sgharms]

Update. Well, to my surprise, I managed to get CFNetwork to play nice by casting spells above my proficiency level as augmented by Claude.ai. Don't worry, no slop commits incoming. @trunkmaster has been very thoughtful about a clean codebase for contribution and I have no dream of messing that up.

Basically, I've got a pristine jail (container) on FreeBSD that I revert to, run the installer step, verify the result, snapshot | rollback, repeat. CFNetwork was a real pain, but from there onward its easy sailing. Right now the main work is making the shell scripts be FreeBSD aware and install files in FreeBSD-style directories. NextSpace installs in /usr FreeBSD shudders at not being in /usr/local/NextSpace. Anyway, those are fairly minor.

Anyway, with a good workflow and the most difficult cmake chants sorted and patches ready to get FreeBSD supported, I'm on my way.

[sgharms]

Oh and those GNUstep services. And systemd. Those are gonna hurt. But I think that's the last major work.

[trunkmaster]

@sgharms thank you for precise understanding of project idea. Interesting that I started project on FreeBSD back then for the same reasons you've mentioned. But when I came to various media/volume management I've found FreeBSD not so easy to do so and it leads to extra development. Linux has all needed system level libraries and infrastructure to meet my requirements: UDisks for volume management, PulseAudio for audio device configuration, D-Bus as quite good interface to services. But I've preserved ability to integrate with other OSes at architectural level of NextSpace frameworks.

But I need stable, reliable OS that could be a base for NextSpace development. That's why I came to CenOS (it was recompilation of enterprise grade RedHat Linux). Things changed since then and I moved to closest available RedHat based distro - Fedora.

I don't know what is the state of D-Bus, UDisks, PulseAudio on FreeBSD, but it's definitely not a BSD style making things. Native platform of all this stuff is Linux not FreeBSD. So you may encounter some FreeBSD-specific bugs or misbehaving. Be ready for this.

As for CFNetwork: you may skip it easily - it doesn't have any usage in project at this point.

[trunkmaster]

Oh and those GNUstep services. And systemd. Those are gonna hurt. But I think that's the last major work.

It should be easiest part of the effort, I think. ;)

[sgharms]

Minor update: I broke through the core foundation network build, and am now teeing up the Libobjc and the number three level tasks around building core and GNUstep make. I think I’ve got a pretty good workflow at this point. But yeah, I don’t expect to be full feature parity to Linux; however, if I have a working desktop that I get to enjoy, that will be enough, and I can iterate towards perfection.

[sgharms]

OK I managed to get through the assistive daemons and now am working in 8_build_Frameworks and am having a bit of a snarl of a time with the dependencies and the ifdefs. It mostly hinges on HAL which doesn't seem to be a thing in FreeBSD. And then between SystemKit and DesktopKit there seems to be some sort of circular dependency. Also things like this:

ifeq ($(findstring freebsd, $(GNUSTEP_TARGET_OS)), freebsd)
  ADDITIONAL_OBJCFLAGS += -DFREEBSD -DWITH_HAL `pkg-config --cflags-only-other hal`
endif

Are leading me to not be able to get free of HAL so i can finish this component so that i can resolve the depts so that I can get to 9 and the finish line :).

I"m going to deploy some more ifdeffing and try to get out from under this.

[sgharms]

Regardless, I'm hoping to have a fork that works...then i'll try to iterate through those diffs as a series of tractable branches that fit with maintainability etc. Three cheers to FreeBSD jails though, its made diagnosing, rollback, retry, etc. easy. There's rumor of Linux jails, so maybe I'll try one of those to test for regresses.

[sgharms]

OK I’ve finally gotten to tackling 9 applications. I’m super excited to get @trunkmaster ‘s improved applications building. A quick run proved that some of the challenges are non trivial and will require a bit of care. I will update next week.

[sgharms]

I took a few days off from this. After wrestling with deps in script 9Applications, it became clear that I'd bungled the 8Framework dependencies. On the upside, nothing failed in the GNUStep layer, it failed in the NextSpace layer which is great because that means my error is programming related and in userland. So, I'm going to try to ping-pong between the Framework build and the TimeMon application figuring that if I can get that to work, I'll be on the path to getting more complex applications like Workspace and Terminal working.

[sgharms]

A few hours later...

Here we have vanilla WindowMaker running a Kitty term into my development jail that's launching TextEdit. OpenUp also builds and launches. I'm now on to the beasts Workspace and Terminal.

[sgharms]

I’ve gotten Workspace to build but tossed out sound support to get things working. We can loop back on that.

Hitting some runtime bugs now in dbus, but I have a working binary at the least.

[wrightmac]

Wow! Very nice. Kudos.
I’m a FreeBSD user, but have a Linux box just for Nextspace ( the NeXT Cube is just a bit too slow these days) My skills aren’t to the level needed for a port. I’m happy to see you have taken it on.
I’m looking forward to trying this FreeBSD version.

[jhstatewide]

Wow, this is awesome. Glad to see some GNUstep stuff still being worked on...

[sgharms]

Just an update. When trying to get other more-advanced applications running, they would crash for various reasons. This lead me to try to build up the stack more carefully. The plan thus was to leverage FreeBSD's ports(7) and their diffs (to minimize drift between Linux/FreeBSD-isms and advanced C spells) and then bolt @trunkmaster 's patches onto that source and then build. I have successfully returned to the update of
#506 (comment), but now built on this new standard.

Sadly, this didn't magically fix the crashes I was having.

What I do have is a series of shell scripts that are suitable to take one from a FreeBSD 14.3 system (I use a jail) to being able to gmake and run some of the simpler applications (e.g. TextEdit or Terminal). This means that one can debug the frameworks or the application source or shell environment with the ability to trust that some obscure autoconf flag wasn't set or some cmake definition wasn't set. You're working, to the best of my ability to tell, with a reliable stack.

In the interest of learning in public, this branch has this bootstrapping code. I do not plan on submitting this branch as is in a PR to canonical. It's good, but there are still some regressions (pruning sound, some guesses around OS-dependent code).