Re: Next GNUstep release?

[Wolfgang Lux]

Fred Kiefer wrote:

> Before FOSDEM we were planing a coordinated release of the GNUstep  
> core
> components. In the meantime a lot has happened. Base was completely
> rewritten, or so it seems from the outside and gui had to play  
> catch up.
> Then I toyed around with the NIB loading and broke a few things.
> Now things are rather stable again and we should come back to our
> original plan. For gui this would be an intermediate release not  
> the 1.0
> release I am hoping to see later this year.
> What still needs to be done in gui is finishing the switch to #import,
> moving on to non fragile ivars will happen later. I first want to see
> the results base gets with its approach to that topic.
>
> Adam, could you once more take up the task of releasing GNUstep? We
> should give it another week or two so that people can complain about
> existing bugs that need to be fixed before the release.

Well, just for a start:

Rereading the Apple docs, I've noticed a (long-standing)  
incompatibility in the nib loading code. When one of the nib loading  
functions is called with an external name table and this dictionary  
contains the NS(Nib)TopLevelObjects key, GNUstep passes ownership of  
the top-level objects to the sender. However, this is not the case in  
Cocoa. Have a look at the Cocoa Resource Programming Guide and in  
particular the section "Loading Nib Files into Your Program  
Programmatically" (http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ 
documentation/cocoa/Conceptual/LoadingResources/CocoaNibs/ 
CocoaNibs.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/10000051i-CH4-SW24). Try the  
example code from Listing 2-4 with your favorite nib/gorm file and  
you will observe a crash in GNUstep because the top-level objects are  
released once too often.

While testing this, I've also noticed that NSNib.h does not define  
the string constants NSNibOwner and NSNibTopLevelObjects, which were  
introduced together with NSNib in 10.3. Please note that Apple uses  
the values @"NSOwner" and @"NSTopLevelObjects" for these constants  
for backward compatibility. This is documented in Apple's NSNib.h  
header file, but I couldn't find it in the online docs. I guess  
following Apple's approach would simplify the nib loading code in a  
few places.

Wolfgang