Re: Release schedule

[Chris B. Vetter]

On Sat, 5 Apr 2003 05:04:09 +0100
Richard Frith-Macdonald <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> I've just been through and altered the gui headers enough to get 
> applications to compile with STRICT_OPENSTEP defined.  I was
> disappointed by the amount of alterations I had to do that, and Im
> certain that the STRICT_OPENSTEP stuff is not in use throughout the
> headers as it should be :-( Hopefully this is not the case in the base
> library, where I think it's all correct.

I finally got around to update to a newer checkout (last Friday's) at
home... I'm not sure about correctness as I do not have a reference,
but-base now compiles cleanly if STRICT_OPENSTEP is defined.

However, the state of the header files is indeed in a sorry state.

Two examples:
Adam apparently moved certain categories to a GSCategory.h, which (IMHO)
is a good thing - however, it's not included anywhere, and worse, it
now resides in gnustep/base/ ...

If I'm in a hurry, or start working on something new, I usually do a
convenient <Foundation/Foundation.h> and/or <AppKit/AppKit.h> include
before I sort out what I actually need to include. Since last Friday
(for me, that is, might have happened earlier) you will get a whole
bunch of warnings and errors of undefined DPSOperators...

> For portability issues (use of STRICT_OPENSTEP, STRICT_MACOS_X, port
> to windows, runtime compatibility options etc) the GNUstep developers 
> *MUST* depend upon the people using the system to fix problems, as
> there aren't enough core developers to test all this sort of thing.

Well, I guess this is exactly what Tim was pointing out.

If we were to clean out core/ leaving only a plain Next/Openstep (run it
through your personal lower/uppercase parser) implementation and put the
GNUstep/Cocoa extensions on top of that, we CAN be *sure*...

> With the best will in the world, errors will continually creep in and
> the people who need a non-standard system have to keep a check on it
> to stop that sort of creep.

Of course.

> Given  the state I found the headers in ... my impression is that 
> nobody is actually using STRICT_OPENSTEP for the first purpose ... If
> nobody is trying to use it for producing OPENSTEP compatible
> applications, should we be bothering with the first usage at all?

Yes.
Maybe I'm the only one, but I do (prefer to) use STRICT_OPENSTEP in
(most of) my stuff.

-- 
Chris