discuss-gnustep
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: FOSDEM and beyond (next stable release of base)


From: David Chisnall
Subject: Re: FOSDEM and beyond (next stable release of base)
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:53:24 +0000

On 9 Feb 2010, at 10:58, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> Make a new 'stable' release (this year!) formally declared as OSX10.4 
> compatible ... possibly to be versioned as gnustep-base-10.4 for marketing 
> purposes.


Do we have a list somewhere of what is still to do towards this goal?  I'm not 
a huge fan of the concept of feature-parity releases, because I'd rather have 
classes from 10.6 that I do use than classes from 10.4 that I don't use, but if 
there's a list somewhere of what is still missing / incomplete in terms of 
compatibility then it would make it easy for people to work on small 
contributions (and give me something to do when I am bored and unmotivated).  

One thing that I noticed to be missing completely is NSLocale - perhaps someone 
familiar with how system locales are defined on our supported platforms could 
look at implementing this.  This has several knock-on effects; a number of 
methods that previously took an NSString* now take an id which can be either an 
NSString* or an NSLocale*.  I made this change in NSNumber, but that was 
trivial as it just passes the locale object to NSString; correct handling of 
the locale in NSString is also needed.

I don't think we should call it gnustep-base-10.4 for one very simple reason: 
we already have a lot of 10.5 and 10.6 stuff implemented.  If we call it 10.4, 
people will assume not only that stuff from 10.4 will work, but also that stuff 
from 10.5/6 won't work.  Assuming that 10.4 stuff will work is good (well, as 
long as it's really true), but we don't want to give people negative 
expectations: particularly now you are seeing a lot of projects dropping 10.4 
support, being seen as ONLY feature-compatible with 10.4 would be a step 
backwards.  The release announcement should contain something like this:

'Care has been taken in this release to ensure that all classes and methods 
shipped as part of the Foundation framework in OS X 10.4 are present.  GNUstep 
development is demand-driven and a number of features from later versions of OS 
X are have been implemented, including several from 10.6.  We provide no 
guarantee in this release that any particular features from newer versions are 
present.'

David

-- Sent from my PDP-11





reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]