Re: GNUstep Base OpenStep Compliance

[Helge Hess]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> 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).

see my huge other mail,
a) the cost of reimplementing NeXTstep is far to high given the actual
   interest in that and makes less sense in an X11 and Windows
   environment anyway.
b) I think that MacOSX developers are not attracted by that. To port
   an OSX application to GNUstep you need to rewrite 80% of the GUI
   if the application is supposed to be nice on both platforms
   Renaissance may help with that, but still that doesn't justify a),
   just make a wrapper around gtk+ that looks roughly similiar to AppKit
   and the OSX developer will be interested in the same amount

> 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.

Hm, I still don't see the compatibility point. If you want to reach 
strict compatibility, obviously the only system which makes sense is 
Cocoa. Everything else is not used anymore in 2003, even the last 
company-internal OpenStep applications are converted to Java or OSX now.

Even in 1998? most applications were NeXTstep and *not* OpenStep, so 
except for some company internal ones there were no apps which actually 
used NSObject based AppKit.

Greetings
  Helge