Re: Release schedule

[David Ayers]

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