Re: libgnustep-base split proposal

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 22 Feb 2006, at 10:20, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> On 19.02.2006, at 17:12, Helge Hess wrote:
>
> > On 19. Feb 2006, at 06:27 Uhr, Andrew Ruder wrote:
> > > Objective-C is an incredible programming language, but right now the
> > > most crippling factor for its widespread use is the lack of a  
> > > "standard
> > > library."
> >
> > Where did you get that conclusion I never heard about that one  
> > before! :-)
>
> I believe his point is a valid one. It would be nice to have some  
> kind of a standard ObjC library which comes with gcc-objc and which  
> provides some basic functionality needed in most applications. But  
> I don't think splitting base would help a lot here, unless we're  
> talking about a more tight integration with gcc, which would be  
> very interesting...
>
> > Whats problematic is that it isn't possible to go w/o it and run  
> > GNUstep binaries/libraries like a regular Unix tool. Thats one of  
> > the reasons why its currently not possible for OGo to switch to  
> > gstep-base.
>
> Exactly, this is IMO a severe drawback of GNUstep, even worse, a  
> major show stopper (at least for me)!

While there are obvious cases (attempting to use a name server daemon  
if there isn't one installed for instance) where there are  
problems ... and I'm all in favour of improving anything like that  
where possible, I have to say again that it is simply NOT TRUE that  
you can't just compile/link with the base library and run a tool.

This problem *USED* to exist because the NSCharacterSet data used to  
be held in external files and without NSCharacterSet working  
properly, string handling doesn't work properly ... so everything is  
messed up.   But this was changed about a year ago, it's not been  
true for a long time now.

I'm sure there are rough edges where behavior of some classes is not  
ideal and needs fixing, but there are no 'show stoppers' that I have  
heard of.
Most likely what we have are usability issues ... where we have rough  
edges because either nobody has reported problems or because a few  
(FHS support in 'make install' for instance) just haven't been dealt  
with yet.  And those rough edges might seem like show stoppers to  
people who don't know how to deal with them ... so we need to know  
about them and smooth them off.