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Re: OpenOffice.org on OS X and GNUstep


From: Adrian Robert
Subject: Re: OpenOffice.org on OS X and GNUstep
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 09:32:09 -0500


On Nov 2, 2005, at 3:17 PM, Sean Fulton wrote:

On 2005-10-07 10:23:07 -0400, Adrian Robert <arobert@cogsci.ucsd.edu> said:


On Oct 6, 2005, at 10:17 AM, Stefan Urbanek wrote:

Hi,
Following article made me think:
http://macslash.org/article.pl? sid=05/10/05/1132218&mode=thread&threshold=-1 What do you think about showing, in some official way, to the OO.org development community, that there is GNUstep that can be used as an option for creating at least some parts of OO.org OS X port? I mean, main argument should be: - if they would use GNUstep, they will widen developer and support base to those
who do not own a Mac and therefore do not have OS X
- on OS X they would use Cocoa, on other platforms they can use GNUstep for
development
- with GCC 4+ it would be possible to mix Objective C (cocoa) code with C++
(oo.org) code
I think they are not very aware of GNUstep.

We should definitely try to raise their awareness. I see on a referenced page there that they are thinking Cocoa, which is good, but my biggest fear is still that they would undertake the effort using Carbon, which other big and recent projects have done (Mozilla port, Andrew Choi's Emacs and XEmacs ports, etc.). I think this usually happens when the developers in charge come from a Carbon and/ or C++ background or start from an OS 9 base. It's unfortunate, both because it shuts out GNUstep, and because using the higher-level Cocoa API is cleaner, easier, and more maintainable.


If they're paying attention at all they won't even consider Carbon. I believe Apple has essentially told developers that Carbon is dead. If you want your app to run (well) on OS X on Intel, you have to develop with Cocoa. Porting something to Carbon now would be a waste of time.

That's good news if so, but if the story so far is any indication, Carbon will continue to maintain a very vigorous life of its own, regardless of what Apple wants. Microsoft, Adobe, and others won't rewrite their apps, and even Apple would have a lot of work to do, redoing Finder, iTunes, etc.. (I have NO idea why they essentally *rewrote* Workspace Manager in Carbon in the first place, but there you have it..)






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