Re: Inheriting more file descriptors to NSTask

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 7 Mar 2011, at 16:04, Banlu Kemiyatorn wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Richard Frith-Macdonald
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Depending on what you are trying to do, you might redirect other decriptors 
>> to one of those, or you might try using named pipes to communicate between 
>> processes.
> 
> I want to write to any predefined descriptor on target process and
> think it would be nice if some extension GNUstep APIs allows this.
> Could it fork and dup the child pipes to predefined descriptor number?
> What would be a proper extension APIs for this?

I don't like to be negative about things when people want to contribute code 
but the GNUstep policy is strongly to be Apple compatible ...

For the core libraries themselves, that means we are actively (if slowly) 
trying to remove old extension code.  In gnustep-base that generally means 
moving extensions out of base itsself and into the base additions library.  So 
the obvious thing to do would be to implement any extension as something in the 
base additions library ... but the point of that library is to be built under 
OSX with the Apple compiler/runtime/Foundation, and enable code running on OSX 
to make use of our additions.  That means that code in the base additions 
library needs to work both when built with gnustep-base on *any* platform, and 
when built with Apple Foundation.  So an extension to NSTask there would also 
need to function as an extension to Apple's NSTask class ... which may be 
really difficult.

In practice, this might mean moving almost the whole NSTask implementation into 
the additions library so that with OSX Foundation, you would actually replace 
Apple's implementation of NSTask with the GNUstep one.
This would be a good thing (we already have an NSTask extension we need to get 
out of the base library), but may be more work than you want to get involved in.