Re: DO compatibility with Apple DO

[Fred Kiefer]

Jiva DeVoe wrote:
> What're the technical barriers that prevent GS DO from being compatible
> with Apple DO?
> 
> What's the chances of those being overcome?
> 

I know this is not the most polite answer, but this question is on our
FAQ. As I needed some time to find the Developer FAQ on our web site
myself, I will share the answer with you:

1.1.4 Can I transfer archived data from GNUstep to Cocoa?
 Apple's archiving format is proprietary and not documented, so this
poses a problem for anyone wanting to implement compatibility with it.
However, even if we reverse engineered the format, there are enough
differences between the class and ivar layouts to make this sort of
compatibility difficult. Not to mention the fact that we would
constantly have to keep up with the changes Apple made. Also Apple's
archiving format, as far as we know, would not be compatible between
different machines because of endiness issues, although GNUstep doesn't
have this problem.
 Your best bet is to implement your own archiving format that would work
both with GNUstep and Cocoa. Fortunately, you don't have to start from
scratch, since this has been essentially done for you in the nib2gmodel
tool, which has an archiver that works both on GNUstep and Cocoa. It
might be nice to split this off into a separate project to make it
easier for other people to do the same thing.

 1.1.5 Does distributed objects work between GNUstep and Cocoa?
 See the answer to the previous question (on archive compatibility) for
why this won't work either.