GNUstep Weekly Update.

[Adam Fedor]

See http://www.gnustep.org

Weeks to 10 June 2001

The major news at the moment is that a new version of the GNU compiler 
collection (gcc) is about to be
released.  It took much lobbying, discussion, contribution of test cases 
etc, but the new compiler has
all the known bugs that stopped previous development versions from 
building GNUstep fixed.  It also
features a shared libobjc containing all the latest GNUstep fixes.  The 
current GNUstep CVS code has
been updated to build with the new compiler (gcc-3.0) and won't require 
you to install a separate
libobjc.

gnustep-base (Foundation)


Modifications made to support the use of the shared objc library 
produced by the gcc-3.0 compiler.
With gcc-3.0 the constant string class  (used for literal strings of the 
format @"..." in source code)
is changed so that the class used by GNUstep doesn't conflict with the 
one that is supplied as part of
the objc library.  A new method [NSString +constnatStringClass] is 
provided to allow programs to determine
the constant string class at runtime.

Bugfixes for parsing property-list files containing escaped special 
characters such as unicode
characters embedded in an ascii file, scanning a hex number which is 
just a zero, formatting calendar
dates with %w, appending unicode strings to C strings, printing error 
messages under windows,

Various build and portability fixes/tweaks have been made, with the 
aim of making it simple to
build a working library on as many platforms as possible.

Some memory management performance optimisations have been made

SSL support disabled by default, (use -enable-openssl flag to 
configure if you want it)



gnustep-gui (GUI frontend library)


Various modifications to get rid of compiler warnings etc with 
gcc-3.0

Fixed various oddities in NSBrowser redrawing etc.

Implemented text attachments and corrected string drawing code to 
handle them.

Fixed code for loading bitmap images in formats other than tiff, 
reorganised
bitmap image code generally.

Implemented various mechanisms for selecting cells in an NSMatrix.




xgps (GUI backend library)


Restructured drag and drop support.




JIGS (Java language interface)


Updated for gcc-3.0
Revised mechanism for generating wrappers to decouple it from the 
building of the original objc library.




GNUstep-Guile (Guile language interface)


Updated to avoid crashes when trying to display unicode strings 
within guile ... converts
these to C strings losing extra unicode information.



Gorm (Interface Builder clone)


NSBox support improved - with changes to allow an NSBox to be 
'edited', to add subviews to a box,
and to let you move them around inside the box, etc.
Some minor bugs were also fixed




tests (Vase library regression tests)


Appending unicode string to mutable C string
Parsing property lists with strings containing escape sequences
Formatting calendar dates with unusual format specifiers
NSUserDefaults class, simple tests