Re: What would be the most complete GNUStep system?

[Stefan Bidi]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 6:31 AM, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

You could also port web.kit, but you still need a "browser", the rendering engine is only half of the part. Vespucci is currently only a very crude test example, although if used with Apple's WebKit it is usable, it lacks certain basic stuff like bookmark editing, download management, history management. I'd like to keep it quite minimal in any case.

Another option would be to see if Firefox or SeaMonkey can be "ported" to GNUstep. They run under Mac and they can't use Carbon, so I wonder what components do they really use. Of course, heavy use of Core kits would be a problem for us, but perhaps CoreBase could be improved for that?

This was the reasoning behind CoreBase, to begin with.  At the time, there was a lot of back and forth discussion about how the GNUstep ecosystem would be so much better off with an advanced browser.  Back then, the goal was to port WebKit, which made heavy use of CoreFoundation (I'm not sure how it looks now).  Also, keep in mind, this was before the GTK and Qt ports of WebKit were usable, so if you wanted to run WebKit anywhere you were SOL.

As for Gecko, I'm going to assume Mozilla also makes use of Quartz, which means Opal would need to be expanded, as well.  I'm not sure if WebKit also uses Quartz.

Some of the obvious missing bits in CoreBase are: CFBundle, CFPlugIn, CFMessagePort, CFNotificationCenter and CFUserNotification.

Lubos also worked on a few CF types, and I'm not sure how far along he got.  They are: CFRunLoop, CFSocket and CFStream.

It doesn't seem like a lot, but these the areas I have the least amount of exposure to.  Not being a Software Engineer by trade (Mechanical and Industrial Eng.), I have to study and research almost every bit of code I put into CoreBase and that takes time.

Stef