Re: Release schedule

[Chris B. Vetter]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003 17:52:39 +0200
"Philippe C.D. Robert" <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 02:49 AM, Chris B. Vetter wrote:
> > You're absolutely right, but again: What good is Cocoa
> > compatibility, if that compatibility stands on wonky legs?
> Why do you say so? GNUstep seems to be pretty stable, and where it is 
> not, patches are welcome.

Uhm, maybe you should drop by #GNUstep and talk to the people in there.
There are some pretty good programmers, like Ludovic, and most of them
will probably tell you otherwise...

Don't get me wrong. I love GNUstep, and I think it's a great tool for
development, alas, it's current implementation is shaky at best. There
are too many bugs and "features" that are not getting addressed.

"Good enough" is just not good enough for "World Domination" ;-)

> Moreover adding classes which originate from
> Apple and not from the OpenStep specs does not automatically imply
> that it is bad stuff (although I agree that not all new classes are
> that impressive ... ) nor that it impacts the quality of the GNUstep 
> implementation.

I'm not saying that Cocoa classes, like NSToolbar, are bad stuff. I'm
saying that GNUstep needs a _working_ _stable_ foundation (preferably a
complete Openstep implementation) before we can think about implementing
Cocoa classes.

> So to me the basic question here is do we want to fork or not. If we 
> do, then I am fine with that, but it has to be made clear, and if we 
> don't then we have to make sure that we come up with something which
> is as close to the commercial side of OpenStep (which is Cocoa in
> these days) as possible.

I don't really think a fork is necessary if we can agree on a common
foundation, that satisfies everyone with respect to stability,
usability and completeness.

IMHO, a half-hearted implementation ("it's good enough") is worse than
nothing at all.

-- 
Chris