Re: [RFC] Header organization GNUstepBase

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Thursday, July 31, 2003, at 03:53 PM, David Ayers wrote:

> Hi Richard,
>
> Moving some of these headers is currently still holding me up :-/
>
> David Ayers wrote:
>
> > > Privat, but need for -base and -add
> > > thr-mach.h
> 'thr-mach.h' is currently inlcuded by NSLock.h and NSThread.h. I'm not 
> sure how I missed that before, when greping to see which headers could 
> be private.  But this only get's installed and used with the NeXT 
> runtime, I didn't notice it was missing.
>
> I'm was considering:
> a) put it in Headers/Additions/GNUstepBase for now and consider option 
> b) and moving it again later.
> b) put it in Source/Additions and make those ivars opaic and only 
> include the header in the *.m files
>
> as this file doesn't change much and I'm therefor not expecting 
> much/any revision history I don't think moving it twice is an issue, 
> so I'll go with b).  But we should put it on our to do list, I think.

Sounds right to me.
But this reminds me of a side issue I keep meaning to bring up...

If you look at Apples headers, you will often see classes with no ivars,
wheras we have loads of ivars in the interfaces we declare in our 
headers.

We normally prefix all our private ivars with an underscore to tell 
people
not to use them in any subclasses they might write, but wouldn't it be 
better
to hide them completely like Apple do?

The problem with making such a change is that it would be too much work
to do all at once, and the change to the ivar layout would require 
subclasses
to be recompiled ... so I've always considered the bad points to 
outweigh
the good points.  However, since we are making massive changes at the 
moment,
I thought it might be a good point to raise this issue for discussion 
... there will
never be a better time to do it!