Re: GNUstep ROADMAP

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Gregory,

Gregory John Casamento wrote:
>>> If you are a maintainer, please make any changes for your section
>>> that you deem appropriate.

as far as I know we currently don't have a maintainer for GUI, so we all
should comment on that part. And some of us already did in previous mail
exchanges. I remember two points from my mail (yes one tends to remember
ones own entries best) which are not addressed by your list. One being
the stable memory layout of the GUI classes. Why would we call a release
1.0 if it does not garranty some sort of stable interface? The other
being the problems with the matrix classes. If we want a "complete
coding" here, we will probably have to wait for GNUstep GUI 1.0 for
another year, or even more. Is this what you want? All multiple cell
classes are only partial usable, they work for simple exmaples, but when
put in general use they seem to fail.

>>
>> GNUstep 1.0
>>
>> 1. it says current base/make/back ... but what about ms-windows  
>> support ... I'm guessing we want base/make/back fixes/improvements  
>> for windows as it's not nearly such a good state as unix-style  
>> systems.  I'm not sure this is a 1.1 issue rather than 1.0
>> This also ignores the fact that window manager interaction (focus in  
>> particular) is undoubtedly the biggest problem with current apps, and  
>> is a backend issue at least as much as a gui issue.

Here I agree with Richard, we need to solve the focus problem, even if
it may require big changes in back. We should not freeze back for the
1.0 release, rather have all interfaces between gui and back investigate
if these are suited for what we may need later on.

> 
>> 2. gui seems wildly ambitious (complete coding on all existing  
>> classes) .
> 
> By this I simply mean that we should try to bring all of the classes currently
> in GNUstep GUI up to spec.   Many of them are already there.   I am *not*
> saying that we should implement all of the Cocoa classes, but only that we
> should finish the classes which have already been started in the repository.
> 
> You may also notice that I say that we should remove those classes which will
> likely never get finished or will not be finished for the 1.0.
> 
> Is this still too ambitious??

Removing classes? Which classes are you talking about. At least after
Richards question you should have given an example. There are classes in
GUI that have currently no actual benefit, like NSMovie, but we will
surely implement them later on. Do you want to remove these classes? Or
what if I wanted to contribute a simple minded implementation of
NSearchField in the next weeks? Would we drop that class again, as the
implementation would not be complete? You surely remember that missing
this class was one of the points that made the porting of Book
impossible about one and a half year ago. For this application even a
very simple implementation would have been sufficent.
Taking your words litarally we would need to decide to remove NSCell, as
I don't see anybody implementing the setEntryType: method for the 1.0
release.

Having a roadmap again is great, but the current state of it does not
help much. To end a bit more constructive let me list the bug numbers of
bugs that I think should be resolved for 1.0:

#5871 (Will require a complete redesign of cursor rect handling)
#6152 (Focus problem)
#10825 (I have a patch for this, but need to test with all different
backends)
#10856 (With this bug I have a very bad feeling, it may be a lot worse
than it looks like)


There are of course a lot of other important bug reports, but these I
would call severe.

Cheers
Fred