(this message has been cross-posted to macosx-dev and eof mailing lists, in order to attract Cocoa developer to gnustep-dev mailing-list; please, post your replies only on gnustep-dev mailing-list)
Hi,
As soon as I saw the announce of GDL2, I tried to compile it on MacOS X. I could make it compile, but it was not painless... Currently, it just compiles, but it cannot work (I haven't implemented some methods, and haven't tested anything, as I don't know the current state of gdl2).
My ugly patch is available here:
ftp://ftp.sente.ch/pub/beta/gdl2-macosx.patch.gz
I have some questions now:
- What is the current state of gdl2?? How compatible is it with EOF 2? WebObjects 4.5's EOF implementation?
- Do gdl2 developers plan to support MacOS X? If they reply "no", no need to read remaining questions ;-)
- Does it even compile on a GNUStep system?? I had to correct some code, independant of platform.
- gdl2 depends on GNUStep-specific classes, like GCArray, etc. Can this dependency be removed? There are also references to methods not implemented in MacOS X, like subclassResponsibility:, but in these cases we could implement categories on MacOS X for GNUStep compatibility.
- gdl2 is not consistent regarding retain/release and garbage collecting; sometimes macros are used for retain/release, sometimes method calls are used. How should it be done?
- EOControl and EOAccess were 2 different frameworks in EOF, and EOControl had no dependency on EOAccess. In gdl2, this is no longer the case...
- On MacOS X, there is now a NSClassDescription class, and categories on NSObject implementing -entityName, etc. This means that either GNUStep should implement them all (if not yet done?), or we should rewrite that part for MacOS X. Conflicting categories are no good.
Finally, I suppose there are a lot of Cocoa developers willing to use EOF... erh gdl2 ;-)
I suppose GNUStep people will find help among them. There are also a lot of former OpenStep/WO4 developers that could help, now that there is a concrete opensource EOF for Cocoa. So please, subscribe to that list, checkout gdl2 and give GNUStep developers needed help. I'll try to.
Thanks for providing this long-awaited EOF-clone!!!