I wanted to put this up for discussion a little bit before doing anything. I've talked it over a little with Richard and I believe he's of the opinion that the projects should merge at some point. Because I see myself having less and less time to work on CoreBase, the merge would be interesting in that base and corebase could share much more code.
My proposal would be to create a new branch of base (something like base-2.0) and move the current corebase code in there. I'm already working towards exposing some of the internal functions in corebase and these can be shared between the 2 libraries.
Here are a few things that I'd like to point out:
(1) Corebase has a hard dependency on ICU. I believe this is a reasonable dependency to have, specially on Unix systems where the big 2 toolkits (Qt and GTK+) also require this library. The library is technically "heavy" in that it carrier complete timezone, locale and character set conversion data itself instead of using the system supplied stuff.
(2) I'm working towards making corebase use Unicode (ie UTF-16) internally wherever possible. I believe this is a saner choice than trying to deal with UTF-8.
(3) I'm still a little torn between keeping the 2 libraries separate or just installing them as a single, large library. I would like to get some opinions on this.
(4) I'd also like to get rid of a lot of stuff in GNUstepBase/ (deprecate on subsequent releases of base and remove all together once the merge is completed). The ones that I can think off the top of my head is GSIMap, GSIArray, Unicode and GSLocale. Maybe a few others.
Anyway, I just wanted to open this up for discussion before doing anything and see what some of you other guys think. Any comments, suggestions, concerns?
Stef