Re: Using GNUstep Categories in Cocoa

[Marcus Müller]

On Monday, April 22, 2002, at 07:39 PM, Edwin Zacharias wrote:

> I see why staying Header compatible is a problem.  Probably solved by 
> some complex set of preprocessor macros.

I don't hope so! The solution I'd prefer is to have the GNUstep 
additions in separate headers, but to keep the implementation within 
gnustep-base. Please note that one cannot put the GNUstep addition 
implementations into another framework, as they're used by gnustep-base 
(cyclic dependency). However, it would be of no benefit nevertheless, 
because the OS X implementations differ, sometimes significantly. I just 
stumbled across an elegant solution to this:

gnustep-base's build process would incorporate a GSExtensions framework, 
which consists of headers and a framework stub only. During the build of 
gnustep-base, all necessary additions would be referenced via the 
GSExtensions.framework headers (embedded in base during the build), the 
implementations will stay where they are now. During the gnustep-base 
install, the GSExtensions.framework will be installed. No GNUstep 
application needs to link against the GSExtensions.framework, because it 
is simply used for providing the extensions "declarations".

On OS X you'd have a real framework that you need to link against, but 
this is no problem nevertheless because the build processes differ 
anyhow. The location of the headers, on the other hand, is the same.

What this means is that one would have to change minimal things in 
gnustep-base (basically create the headers, add the new build target, 
change #include's where necessary to use the new headers). It directly 
enables the use of the GSExtensions.framework without real need to port 
applications to OS X.

Cheers,

  Marcus

--
Marcus Mueller  .  .  .  crack-admin/coder ;-)
Mulle kybernetiK  .  http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com
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