Re: GNUstep Base OpenStep Compliance

[Helge Hess]

Markus Hitter wrote:
> > Really ? Which people and what did they need to change ?

Well, this are not answering my question above. Which people were 
required to change what exactly ? The initial claim was that Cocoa API 
was changing in an source code incompatible way and that Apple uses 
"hacks" to make that invisible, which I cannot follow.

Again Jeff claimed: "Many people had to change their programs between 
10.1 and 10.2" but didn't provide any example for this.

> Well, two things come to mind:
>
> 1) All sort of hardware and network related stuff, e.g. the introduction 
> of Rendezvous.

OK, we are talking about Cocoa (Foundation+AppKit). The only "changes" 
(additions!) in Foundation (10.1=>10.2) I'm aware of are two small 
classes supporting Rendezvous and the new key-based archiving.
But those is a very small extension which doesn't affect Cocoa source 
compatibility at all.
(BTW: I'm certain GNUstep has much bigger changes between even minor 
releases).

I think the only change in AppKit (10.1=>10.2) was the introduction of 
the progress indicator. But again, this was a) a very small addition and 
b) not affecting source code compatibility.

Notably any changes made to Cocoa are extremly well documented, too.

> 2) Introduction of weak linking and a compile variable named 
> MAC_OS_X_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET.

So, what the hell has this todo with source code compatibility ? Sigh ...

Again: source code produced on 10.0 still compiles just fine on 10.2.

> Both make it difficult for programs compiled on OS X 10.2 to run on 10.1 
> and obviously caused some confusion among developers.

So what ? You are aiming at downward compatibility which no system I 
know provides (GNUstep is certainly *much* worse on that than Cocoa). 
But Cocoa provides full upward compatibility which is all that can be 
expected.

> But neither of them was a change to existing API.

Of course not. Cocoa *needs* to be stable, they have a much larger 
developer audience than GNUstep.

BTW: supporting Cocoa API cannot be compared to WINE, since WINE aims 
for binary compatibility which is a much different issue.

Helge