Re: GNUstep Base OpenStep Compliance

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 09:03  pm, Adam Fedor wrote:

> OK, Here, I hope I've made it painfully clear what our goals are 
> (other parts of the mission statement removed for brevity):
>
> <p>Out target implementation for the core libraries is the OpenStep
> standard and its implementation as defined in OPENSTEP 4.2.  Our goal
> is to maintain the implied behavior of the OpenStep specification as
> much as possible and document any deviations from this behavior, in 
> order
> to make it easy to port an Application from OPENSTEP. Our second goal
> is to achieve compatibility with a reference Cocoa implementation 
> (currently
> MacOSX 10.2) as needed to implement code which can be cross-compiled on
> Cocoa, execpt for documented differences which conflict with the 
> overall
> goals of GNUstep (detailed below).

What I want to see is a system that behaves (look and feel of apps)
like NeXTstep (that's the real goal!) but is compatible with MacOS-X
(to attract developers).

In that light, I thing the compatibility priorities above are in the 
wrong
order.

I can't see why we'd want the OPENSTEP 4.2 implementation as a
particular target.  In terms of look and feel of the gui and 
applications
IMO NeXTStep3.2 was better and we should be aiming for that,
while in terms of implementing the OpenStep API OPENSTEP4.2 is
little better than MacOS-X, so where undocumented implementation
details are concerned we should take a live system in preference to
a dead one as our primary standard.

At least I can go out and buy a reference copy of MacOS-X to test
against ... even if I can find someone to sell me a second-hand copy
of OPENSTEP-4.2 the chances are it won't run on my computer
because it won't have drivers for the modern hardware.

I'm very happy to have backward compatibility options for OPENSTEP
users built into the code ... as long as those users help maintain them,
but I don't want to spend my time borrowing time on someones old
OPENSTEP system to test each change I make so that the code
conforms to the OPENSTEP4.2 implementation.