Re: GNUstep Coding Standard Additions

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2005-05-08 14:17:27 +0100 Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu> wrote:

> > I think we are agreed that we want to categorise a method/class by
> > the version where it was introduced, and the version where it was
> > removed (NeXT/Apple have removed some things from their APIs)
>
> This sounds like a good plan.
> Just to be clear, deprecation does NOT count as removal, right?

Correct ... deprecation and removal are different.

> > I would say the headers should be rearranged so that methods
> > appear in order of the version in which they first appeared, and
> > alphabetically within a version.  That way, adding/findng methods
> > for a particular version range is trivial.
>
> Currently most of the headers are not alphabetized, but have methods
> organized by functional area.  E.g, in NSDate:

Not sure about 'most' ... it's a currently a mix, but I don't know the 
proportions.

> I'm not wedded to this, but it's been around a long time and people
> are used to it.  Rather than changing it everywhere, how about just
> alphabetizing / sorting the additions and changes?

Sounds OK ... I just think it's easier and more useful to organize by 
version, and straightforward to alphabetize within groups.  Ordering by 
functional areras is very vague ... it's quite subjective what you consider 
to be a functional area (and we should try not to copy Apple as a general 
principle).  I don't much care though.

> > #else if OSVERSION(4.2, 10.3)
> > // Methods not in OpenStep, but present in OPENSTEP 4.2, then removed in
>
> How important is this tracking of OpenStep spec vs. OpenStep 4.2
> (and 4.1, etc.)?  Do we even have online reference documentation for
> this?  It seems like we have just been marking "OpenStep" in the API
> so far without distinguishing versions and no complaints.

I'm not sure about OPENSTEP versions, but we certainly discriminate between 
OpenStep (the specification, which we certainly do have online documentation 
for) and later APIs.  There are certainly a few APIs that were added/removed 
between OpenStep and MacOS-X, so logically, we need to give them 
addition/removal versions other than 0.0 or 10.0
Personally, we could call them all 4.0 for all I care, but I imagine some 
people will want this to be correct.

> Also, I'm worried that "OSVERSION" will be confusing, particularly
> when looking at code sitting on an Apple system.  How about
> STEP_VERSION, API_VERSION, OS_API_VERSION, STEP_RELEASE, or ... ?

I have no opinion on the exact naming we use ... I just suggested the first 
name that came into my head.  If Alex is in a hurry to categorise, he oculd 
use any name and we could do a global search/replace to change it later.
For convenience. it should be a short but unique name which is fairly 
self-explanatory.