Re: GORM file formats

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Saturday, July 21, 2001, at 01:31 PM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> On Fri, 20 Jul 2001 16:31:02 -0700
> "Jonathan B. Leffert" <jonathan@leffert.net> wrote:
>
> > It would be nice if the NSResponder and its subclasses could encode
> > themselves in a format that is text and not binary.  If, for example, 
> > an
> > NSWindow with all of its widgets generated in GORM could be encoded in
> > plist form, it could be merged easily between CVS code branches.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> Or even better in XML, since the new IB on Mac OS X will use XML too, 
> this would perhaps lead to easier portability and thus to more apps for 
> GNUstep.

There are two options ... gmodels (already property-list format) or a 
property-list archiver/unarchiver (gstep-base
contains extensions to support this).  I prefer the latter, since it 
does not involve writing extra code for each
class.

However, I don't think either would achieve all that much - for CVS to 
manage this stuff easily, the issue is not
binary v text, it's non-localised v localised changes.  For revision 
control to be efficient, different versions
of a document must be substantially similar - which means that GORM 
would need to try to preserve structure and
naming of objects between files it loads in and revised versions it 
writes out.  This is much trickier than
making the file format text rather than binary.

The use of XML in MacOS-X would make reverse engineering easier ... but 
it would still be a huge effort to change
coding of *all* the classes in GNUstep to match the reverse-engineered 
formats used by Apple - so interoperability
at that level won't be coming soon (if ever).