Re: Release schedule

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 08:26 PM, 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...

If there are so many issues w/ GNUstep why is address@hidden then 
so quiet?

> 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.

OK, I admit I am mostly using the FoundationKit, and this is pretty 
stable as far as I can tell.

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

Of course :-)

> > 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.

Again I agree, but the question is 'what is this foundation'? Is it 
OpenStep which nobody really ever used, is it OPENSTEP 4.2, the 
YellowBox or Cocoa, and if the latter what version?! If it is OPENSTEP 
then we should maybe not integrate any changes from Cocoa at this stage 
at all, since this might lead to the impression that we  target Cocoa, 
instead me might distribute such additions separately.

> > 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.

This is a tough issue, there are many expectations and needs, but we 
should at least give it a try, yes... :-)

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip