> An EXCELLENT utility contribution would be for someone to write
> a front end for CVS for NEXTSTEP, then we could use it in the
> development of the kit, and it could be adopted as part of the
> kit as well.
Well, I wrote a free little TickleService which serves as a pretty decent front-end to CVS. TickleService itself is shareware, not freeware, but BOY is it worth the price!!!
The main drawback is that CVS has its own ideas about directories, and '.nib' directories then get screwed up by CVS. There is a makefile.{pre,post}amble (I'm not sure which) that can handle those, which is on the net somewhere.
This brings up the point that we may want a standard makefile which will work with all the different libraries and palletes, especially if we start breaking things up into subdirectories. I think NeXT handles all the build and install stuff pretty well, but I'm not sure if it can handle multiple subdirectories.
I wrote something for generic make which does some of that (builds recurisively through subdirectories), which I would be willing to donate/adapt. But first, I think, we should check if NeXT's standard makefiles - plus Installer.app - can do everything we need:
= building libraries and exceutables
= installing those, and headers, in the appopriate place
but it also would be nice to have
= runnings test to verify things were built/installed properly
= building a distributable package from the master source tree
and things like that.
Perhaps once Don gets MiscKit cleaned up, it would be worthwhie to put together a combination of CVS, make, and Install that would take care of that. Such a tool - if written properly - could be as valuable a part of the Kit to developers as anything else in it. I might be able to put some work into that, once people decide what is needed.