Re: FOSDEM and beyond (next stable release of base)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 14 Feb 2010, at 14:53, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 9 Feb 2010, at 10:58, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> 
>> Make a new 'stable' release (this year!) formally declared as OSX10.4 
>> compatible ... possibly to be versioned as gnustep-base-10.4 for marketing 
>> purposes.
> 
> 
> Do we have a list somewhere of what is still to do towards this goal?  I'm 
> not a huge fan of the concept of feature-parity releases, because I'd rather 
> have classes from 10.6 that I do use than classes from 10.4 that I don't use, 
> but if there's a list somewhere of what is still missing / incomplete in 
> terms of compatibility then it would make it easy for people to work on small 
> contributions (and give me something to do when I am bored and unmotivated).  

I don't think there *is* such a list.
And actually, base may be as close to 10.5 as 10.4
Probably we could do with some sort of compatibility table (perhaps on the 
wiki) showing what classes we implement and which of the Apple releases they 
correspond to.

> One thing that I noticed to be missing completely is NSLocale - perhaps 
> someone familiar with how system locales are defined on our supported 
> platforms could look at implementing this.

IIRC Adam implemented GSLocale (in base ages ago to handle locale stuff) ... 
but its not public and its probabluy nothing much like NSLocale ... however, it 
might be a good starting point.


> The release announcement should contain something like this:
> 
> 'Care has been taken in this release to ensure that all classes and methods 
> shipped as part of the Foundation framework in OS X 10.4 are present.  
> GNUstep development is demand-driven and a number of features from later 
> versions of OS X are have been implemented, including several from 10.6.  We 
> provide no guarantee in this release that any particular features from newer 
> versions are present.'

Actually, I'm guessing we don't want to implement the scripting classes or the 
libxml2 wrappers unless someone wants to contribute them (since we have 
pre-existing alternatives for both, and no interest doing them).  Is there 
anything else we might want to explicitly say we have no immediate intention of 
working on/including?