Re: Release schedule

[Jeff Teunissen]

Nicola Pero wrote:

[snip]

> Being compatible with Cocoa or with OPENSTEP is probably not the central
> issue at the moment; I'm not sure why Cocoa compatibility is blaimed for
> instability, while other stuff, such as the new text system and other
> ongoing works (which have nothing to do with Cocoa), are much more
> likely causes of instability.  In most cases, we can be compatible with
> both Cocoa and OPENSTEP - since they are very similar, except for Cocoa
> having more methods or classes (which people who don't want can ignore),
> so deciding which of the two we are targetting is rarely a big issue
> (but sometimes it is of course).

Actually, to a certain degree, Cocoa compatibility can be a stability
problem. Not necessarily from a code-quality standpoint, but an important
one nonetheless... API stability. One benefit of the OpenStep specs and
targeting the OPENSTEP implementation is that they are a target that can
actually be _reached_, while Apple are _always_ going to be ahead of
reimplementations of their APIs. The WINE project has this problem with
Microsoft.

We have a situation where coders usually use CVS for bug fixes, and the
APIs/semantics change often. There are apps out there that don't work with
any set of released GNUstep libraries, because some of the things needed
for the app to work are only in CVS, and by the time the code they need is
released something else will have changed, so we'll need to update our
code, again making our apps incompatible with the released version of the
GNUstep libs.

If I'm working with the "tried-and-true" OpenStep semantics, changing the
implementations of certain APIs to be Mac OS X compatible will break my
app (and probably others).

Now, I've been able to help Alexander implement some things (and found
visible differences between GNUstep and OPENSTEP) just by having my
OPENSTEP 4.2 system trying to do the same things that I'm trying to do
with GNUstep.

I'm perfectly happy to use my OPENSTEP machine to help
implementation/portability efforts.

[snip]

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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