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Re: Release schedule


From: David Ayers
Subject: Re: Release schedule
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2003 09:17:54 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3b) Gecko/20030210

Hi,

Collectively, we seem to be striving to 3 levels of compatiblity:

OpenStep Specification
OPENSTEP 4.2 implementation
current Cocoa implementation

enriched by some very useful GNUstep specific extensions.

I personally believe the OpenStep Specification is more of an academic issue as there is probably *very* few people if any intersted in maintaining code that will be portable between GNUstep and strict OpenStep implementations. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I still believe there is a viable amount of support for compatiblity of the OPENSTEP 4.2 implementation as there are still a.) real OPENSTEP Enterprise implementations out there, that continuously consider GNUstep as a potential strategy to provide a future for thier project. b.) real ObjC WebObjects implementations, with the same goal (the API of WO has already slightly advanced to a Cocoa like API though.) It would also supply a stable baseline that developers implementing for GNUstep exclusively can rely on.

The potential support from the Cocoa communtiy and the possiblitly of writing portable code for GNUstep and Cocoa makes, maintaining a decent level of compatiblilty to the current Cocoa API too attractive to be ignored.

But when tracking Cocoa, we should not try to be more restrictive just because Cocoa is being more restrictive We should also not add features that simply don't map into the GNUstep environment.

I think the decision and it reasoning of whether or not to add a given feature set or not, should be promanently advertised and remain debatable at certain 'fixed' intervals.

Any feature added, lastly depends on someone contributing it. Yet we also know that the integration may break or complicate existing code. And this is the point where developers need mechanisms, guidelines and discussion on how or whether to integrate these features. Maybe this hasn't been happening in the right context. Maybe the GNUstep Project needs some type of convention / forum to come by these decisions and document the reasoning publicly, but keeping it debatable (maybe after each major release).

Cheers,
Dave






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