As reported in Debian bug #922284 [1]:
As evident from the prefix, GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT is a GNUstep variable and
Window Maker should not set it. Furthemore, it has been deprecated for
12 years already. As of gnustep-make/2.7.0-4 the GNUstep build system
is configured in strict v2 mode which makes it impossible to compile
GNUstep software. In a terminal started from a Window Maker session:
yavor@aneto:/tmp/gorm.app-1.2.24$ make
This is gnustep-make 2.7.0. Type 'make print-gnustep-make-help' for help.
Running in gnustep-make version 2 strict mode.
rm -f InterfaceBuilder; \
ln -s GormLib InterfaceBuilder
/usr/share/GNUstep/Makefiles/config-noarch.make:121: *** GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT
is obsolete. Stop.
It is also impossible to build gnustep-make from pristine upstream
source:
yavor@aneto:/tmp$ wget -q
ftp://ftp.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/core/gnustep-make-2.7.0.tar.gz
yavor@aneto:/tmp$ tar xzf gnustep-make-2.7.0.tar.gz
yavor@aneto:/tmp$ cd gnustep-make-2.7.0/
yavor@aneto:/tmp/gnustep-make-2.7.0$ ./configure
...
yavor@aneto:/tmp/gnustep-make-2.7.0$ make
config-noarch.make:121: *** GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT is obsolete. Stop.
Note that the majority of GNUstep users use Window Maker as their window
manager and many of them build GNUstep software from source, mostly
because of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime which depends on Clang
(Debian packages use GCC and the GCC/GNU runtime).
Our solution is to replace the GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT environment variable with our
own environment variable, WMAKER_USER_ROOT. This is documented in NEWS.
[1] https://bugs.debian.org/922284
This macro is used when handling directories with OPEN_MENU, e.g., to list
available image files for setting the workspace background.
When parsing a menu file, we replace any instances of #usergnusteppath#
with either GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT or ~/GNUstep if the former is not set. In
this way, authors of menu files do not have to worry about whether users
will have this variable set or not.
We also document this feature in WindowMaker/menu.in, which generates the
default English language old-style menu and currently contains the existing
documentation for the Window Maker menu system.
The path to WPrefs has been hardcoded in many of the menu files to
/usr/local/GNUstep/Applications/WPrefs.app/WPrefs, which would only actually
work if the user ran something like:
./configure --with-gnustepdir=/usr/local/GNUstep
during build.
Instead, we add a .in extension to all menu files with this issue and use sed
to use the actual WPrefs path (given by the wprefs_bindir output variable) and
generate a new menu file.
A very similar idea is already used to generate the WMState file, which sets
WPrefs as the command for the Window Maker logo tile in the dock.
This patch fixes Debian bug #851737:
https://bugs.debian.org/851737
