Re: The goal of GNUstep 1.0

[Fred Kiefer]

Now that everybody publishes his private wish list, I will write down my
secret agenda for GNUstep 1.0 as well.

Of course the main goal is to finish the cairo backend and have it as
the offical backend for GNUstep. :-)

On the more down to the bits side, I would like to see a stable memory
layout for all GUI classes. This has two aspects, we are still missing
some ivars that will be needed for full OpenStep/Cocoa compliance. The
other side is that we could use more bit fields to make these classes
more compact. After a 1.0 release it will get pretty hard to change the
memory usage of these classes, so we need to do it now.

Simple things that I would like to see in GUI and back to support
theming are pattern colours (here I had a patch some months ago which
still requires some work) and colour gradients.

There are also a few bug reports that look rather serious to me and
should be fixed for 1.0. For example, I am thinking of the cursor bug,
where the wrong cursor may be left over after closing a window. Also the
window manager interaction is on this list.

For the GUI classes themselves, I am mostly concerned about the matrix
classes. (NSMatrix, NSTableView, NSOutlineView) all of them are not up
to a 1.0 release and there is currently nobody working on them. We also
should give the text system another polishing and look at the
performance issue with window redraws (I published a profining on this).

All of this is doable, not even too hard, but take a look at the change
log of GUI for the last few months and you will doubt that it is going
to happen this year.

Cheers
Fred