Re: GSEncodingName

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Oct 2006, at 06:17, David Ayers wrote:

> Thanks, I've just done this.  My main issue was not that it would be
> hard to implement, it was a matter of maintaining the mapping together
> with the NSStringEncoding enum.

Ah ... that's part of the public API ... the name and value of the  
NSStringEncoding enumerated type (NSString.h)

I can't see numeric values changing, but perhaps we should change the  
non-standard enumeration constants to use a GS prefix rather than an  
NS prefix.
I expect we will also add character encodings in future, but  
shouldn't remove any.

As part of the public API, any removal/renaming will go through a  
deprecation process ... I have tried to do a two release cycle in the  
past (ie if it's marked as deprecated in release N, then it must  
still be present in N+1 but we can remove it so that it is not in  
release N+2).
I'd like to make that standing policy for public API removal (and I'd  
like to get to a stage where private APIs really are private ... not  
exposed at all beyond the technical minimum of a few external symbols  
found in the binaries).