Re: Raising GNUstep's Profile

[Gregory John Casamento]

David,

--- David Chisnall <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Looking through the latest set of developer docs from Apple, I see a  
> lot of things that say `Available on OS X 10.x or later.'  It  
> occurred to me that, once these features exist on GNUstep, it might  
> be beneficial to release a framework that could be included with new  
> applications to support these classes on older versions of OS X.   
> Developers could then target the latest version of OS X, and still  
> deploy on older ones.  As an added bonus (or the main point,  
> depending on your perspective), they would then see that their code  
> would also run nicely on GNUstep, which would help raise awareness  
> among Cocoa developers.
> 
> Good idea?  Unworkable idea?

It's a great deal of work.  

You would have to: 

1) Identify all of the parts of GNUstep that are needed for a particular older
version of OSX. 
2) You would need to create a library containing these classes.
3) You would also have to graft on, either using poseAs: or with categories,
the changes made to other classes already present in the older version of OSX.
4) There might need to be several versions of this library, each for a
different version of OSX.

I've simplified a great deal, but this seems like the essence of what would
need to be done.  IMHO, this would be interesting as a separate GNUstep related
project, but not as part of the core project.

Also, now that OSX has keyed nibs, those nibs can be used on older versions of
OSX which support keyed nibs and vice versa (forward and backward
compatibility).  For versions which don't support keyed nibs, we couldn't
implement a library since the classes in gui/base would be using the older
typed stream NSArchiver, which we can't read.

> David

Later, GJC

Gregory John Casamento 
-- CEO/President Open Logic Corp. (A MD Corp.)
## Maintainer of Gorm (IB Equiv.) for GNUstep.