Re: libgnustep-base split proposal ... alternative ideas

[Helge Hess]

On 19. Feb 2006, at 10:21 Uhr, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> I don't think libFoundation is more flexible than GNUstep-base ...  
> rather
> it's different, and I don't really see why gnustep needs to try to  
> 'beat' it.

I agree.

For me lF is a bit more flexibile since I can change anything I want  
while I must deal with GNUstep people for gstep-base changes ;-) But  
this should be much better now because people (like me?) can get own  
branches in Svn. No?

> However, if that's what you want, it might be good to identify  
> *exactly*
> why some people prefer it.

As written in the other mail, "some" is actually just OGo and I can  
summarize some reasons if there is interest (but I've already  
explained most of them in the past).

> I've heard its string handling is fast but non-unicode (haven't looked
> for ages), perhaps it's the memory footprint and speed of strings?

I don't expect that libFoundation is particulary faster or slower on  
strings than GNUstep. Why should Unicode matter for that? (don't you  
have 8-bit NSString cluster subclasses?)

What I found when I tried a SOPE app with gnustep-base a while ago  
that lF was quite a bit faster. But I _never_ investigated the  
reason, so it might be something trivial to fix (it was actually you  
who suggested that it might be due to 8-bit strings, but I don't  
think thats very likely).

Thats part of the problem moving to gstep-base, I honestly don't have  
the time to investigate such issues, even if they might be trivial  
changes inside gstep-base.

> I'm not sure about flexibility ... I often think we may be too  
> flexible.
> I don't really mean that we should reduce that flexibility, but I  
> do think
> we need to look into how we can make it really, really simple to  
> manage.

Agreed.

> Linux FHS installation (really just needs implementing in gnustep- 
> make)

If that would be in FHS it would be AWESOME for us :-) We currently  
use rather wicked hacks to accomplish that.

> Resource-free library usage

I don't think that resource-free is the most important thing. The  
important thing is that gstep-base looks up the resources in the  
appropriate place, which would be [prefix]/share/gstep-base-1.12/...

This is already implemented? Along with proper versioning?

Also note that FHS and NeXT-style directory names are most likely  
different, eg
  [gs-prefix]/Library/WebServerResources
vs
  [prefix]/share/www

Same for application names. Expecially because NeXT naming never  
includes versions while FHS tools need to. Eg:
  [gs-prefix]/WOApps/OpenGroupware.woa
vs
  [prefix]/sbin/ogo-webui-1.1

Summary: doing FHS properly is quite tricky and "automatic"  
approaches are most likely going to suck ;-)

> We also aim is to cut down on use
> of environment variables  (we have already done that somewhat)
> by putting them in the config file ... though where MacOS-X uses
> environment variables we need to retain compatibility.

Actually we have three modes here:
a) env variables are set => search GNUstep environment
b) not set => use just FHS
c) on MacOSX => use MacOSX ;-)

Greets,
  Helge
--
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/
OpenGroupware.org