Re: Legacy applications and headers

[Helge Hess]

On Mar 19, 2004, at 4:40 PM, David Ayers wrote:
> Now as Skyrix seems to have abandoned libFoundation (and I have no 
> idea if GDL2 would have ever worked with it) we might have a true 
> binary situation (ie. either GNUstep or Cocoa).

For the foreseeable future SKYRIX will use libFoundation and it is in 
no way "abandoned". Indeed this is a must, because SKYRIX customers 
have at least two years of basic maintenance by German law (so 
libFoundation will be actively supported for at least this timeframe).
I think GDL2 should work just fine with libFoundation, but this 
combination is probably not very interesting. New GDL2 developments 
should start with either Cocoa/GDL2 or gstep-base/GDL2, not lF/GDL2.

OpenGroupware.org on the other side will use gstep-base - once the port 
(not just SOPE, but the complete OGo) properly works and is as fast as 
with libFoundation. Of course it will continue to run on libFoundation 
for the foreseeable future as well (there is no point/reason in 
breaking compatibility with libFoundation, its done, bugfree and just 
works), but this won't be the default.

Now, to the real topic:

Personally (from a lF point of view) I don't care about the patch, its 
a speed optimization for OSX and has no significant effects on 
compilation performance on ix86/Linux platforms.
Obviously the way it is now is technically correct (#ifdef 
NeXT_Foundation_LIBRARY), because this optimization only applies to 
Cocoa, but I see ZNeK's point about configuration and think that it is 
valid.

The question is the actual define. I would suggest

  #ifndef __APPLE__

since on Apple platforms the precompiled headers are available. Of 
course this slows down compilation with gstep-base on MacOSX (unless 
gstep-make/gstep-base can make use of the pch compiler?), but I wonder 
whether this is an important case?

As discussed before with Nicola an

  #ifdef GNUSTEP

really refers to the gnu-gnu-gnu library combo which has nothing to do 
with the inclusion of header files and

  #ifdef GNUSTEP_BASE_LIBRARY

is also semantically incorrect (since this is true for any alternative 
Foundation library).
So I would discourage to use one of them.

Summary: the proper solution would be a "-DGNUSTEP_WITHOUT_PCH=1" 
define generated by the gstep-make configure script (this would also 
take into account that even gstep-base might have a PCH compiler in the 
future!). Until this is available the __APPLE__ define is probably the 
best match to the original intention.

regards,
  Helge
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