Re: ABI Compatibility (was Re: Installation woes for the average user...)

[David Ayers]

Am Freitag, den 06.03.2009, 06:17 +0000 schrieb Richard Frith-Macdonald:

> I feel we probably need to break things in trunk during the  
> development cycle to get a reaction and some suggestions from other  
> people.  For instance I asked for ideas about the change to using  
> NSUInteger,NSInteger, and CGFloat, and I adopted your idea of a  
> #define to retain the old style behacvior, but since then I've seen no  
> feedback about making this change work with gui/back and other apps.   
> What I probably need to do is switch that code to use the new Apple  
> behavior by default, deliberately breaking 64bit systems so that  
> people will do something about it, or will at least sned specific bug  
> reports for me to deal with. 

FWIW, I think I'm fine with changing the default, yet hope the other
option remains.  But since you said you received no feedback I want to
reiterate another suggestion:

Instead of:
#if     defined(GS_64BIT_OLD)

typedef int     NSInteger;
typedef unsigned int    NSUInteger;
typedef float           CGFloat;

which produces a lot of compiler warning for code targeting both GNUstep
and legacy API, would you consider:

#define NSInteger int;
#define NSUInteger unsigned int;
#define CGFloat float;

the bonus:
it stops the warnings: Code targeting older API's will compile without
the noise.

the drawback:
it stops the warnings: Code being my not be upgraded to use the new
types so that future versions will be compatible with 64 bit.

Personally I can understand if you believe the #define may be worse and
I can surely keep that patch locally.  But then again, anyone wanting to
stay up to date will hardly use the define/configure option.

Cheers,
David