Re: GNUstep Base OpenStep Compliance

[Adam Fedor]

On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 05:05 AM, David Ayers wrote:
> I would like the "Mission Statement" to include at least the first 
> two.  Plus I would like guidelines, and or mechanisms in place to 
> handle conflicts between the first two.  I believe that even though 
> the last one might have prompted the discussion, I agree with Nicola 
> that "stability" is implied and shouldn't be part of an official 
> statement, realizing that as long as we agree to achieving the first 
> to but haven't, the latter will probably just not happen.
OK, Here, I hope I've made it painfully clear what our goals are (other 
parts of the mission statement removed for brevity):

<p>Out target implementation for the core libraries is the OpenStep
standard and its implementation as defined in OPENSTEP 4.2.  Our goal
is to maintain the implied behavior of the OpenStep specification as
much as possible and document any deviations from this behavior, in 
order
to make it easy to port an Application from OPENSTEP. Our second goal
is to achieve compatibility with a reference Cocoa implementation 
(currently
MacOSX 10.2) as needed to implement code which can be cross-compiled on
Cocoa, execpt for documented differences which conflict with the overall
goals of GNUstep (detailed below).
We will consider changes and additions to our API under the following
circumstances.</p>

<ul>
<li>We will add methods and classes, either from Cocoa or our own
extensions, when they are sound and appropriate for the scope of
GNUstep.</li>
<li>We won't remove things, even if they have been removed by 
Apple.</li>
<li>Where there is a real problem with a change, we find a technically
superior work-around. In rare cases, this might involve a change in
the original OpenStep API</li>
</ul>

<p>Note that it is not the responsibility of the main developers to
achieve or maintain Cocoa compatibility! All requests for changes and/or
additions should be sent via the standard bug reporting methods.
We will do our best to integrate these changes as long as they do not
conflict with the previously stated rules, and the change is accepted
by a general consensus of the develoeprs.</p>


> My suggestion would be to start posting ChangeLog entries (possibly 
> including patches), so that people have it easier to follow what's 
> going on.  I've been doing that, but as no one joined in, I guess, 
> I've been annoying people more than anything else.  Maybe we should 
> have a seperate patches-
I like it, at least (for non-trivial patches).