Re: Intermediate Summary: Re: GNUstep.org website redesign proposal

[Stefan Bidi]

On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 3:14 AM, Riccardo Mottola <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi,
I would not like to do that, we remain "runtime neutral", the runtime is a dependency. You can use GCC with its GNU runtime, if you use Clang you must install libobjc2, but you can (or at least, could, I did that a couple of months ago) to use GCC+libobjc2.

The point I was trying to make is that some of the features GNUstep implements are highly dependent on the runtime.  Have 2 competing runtimes with slightly incompatible implements of the Objective-C language might be confusing.  If both implementations are going to be supported, we need to be very explicit as to which features we support with one and the other.  Stating "GNUstep supports all modern Objective-C features, including ARC and blocks" is only half true because we only support those features if the correct runtime and compiler are in use.  Not to mention, some of these features are only supported by specific versions of the compilers.  The current Debian stable, for example, includes clang 3.0 only, and if I remember correctly, this version doesn't support certain runtime features.  A few years back I also temporarily switch to Slackware and it still doesn't officially support clang/llvm.

I know a significant number of GNUstep developers use and actively support the BSDs (I develop corebase on a Debian Testing machine, and boot into FreeBSD to test), however, you still need to admit that GNU/Linux is the most used FOSS OS on desktops.