gnustep general impressions and possible bugs in PC, gorm, etc

[Riccardo]

Hey all,

during the last days I was away from home with my laptop and so I hacked 
quite a bit on PRICE using the latest gnustep libraries and tools.

I'm happy to see a lot of improvment! And I hope to have contributed a 
bit with the new release of PRICE that is coming along and that will be 
released quite soon (hopefully).

Since I had only gnustep with me and no MacosX all development was done 
on it and so I stressed and used GNUstep more and I'll share a some 
experiences, bugs and impressions. I htink this mail will be much less 
negative since the (in)famous "gnsutep breakage report". True is that I 
am on linux/x86 so it is a much more "standard" platform and many bugs 
don't show up, but many others have been fixed.

Some of these are possibly bugs, if other can confirm then I can file 
them in the bug tracker, but I'd like some feedback. Other are maybe 
just missing features or unexpected behaviors.


ProjectCenter:
--------------
I am very happy to see a lot of improvment in it since the last time! It 
crashes rarely but much more important it has now support for NSTypes 
and some other necessay things to build PRICE and so I am now migrating 
the project to this new release. Also I see that several of my 
suggestions of my alst time have been implemented. Still I have some 
notes.

- when using the "Project Editor" and leaving the other panels inside 
the project window (not tear-off) I cannot switch back from the 
"builder" or "launcher" back to the editor. I suppose clicking on an 
open file shoud do that or the thirt button in the toolbar which is 
inactive. Tearing off the build and launch panel makes the editor usable 
when "docked"

- the text editor has bugs. For example it can happen that when deleting 
characters with backspace at the beginning of a line, instead of 
teleting the new-line itself, the new line remains and the characters at 
teh end of the upper line are deleted (while the cursor remains in the 
lower line at the leftmost char). It maybe a gnustep bug instead of PC, 
but I cannot reporduce it in TextEdit for example.

- the editor is very "simple", a "go to line" funciton would ease 
debugging :)

- can the project file only be called "PC.project"? renaming it to 
another name makes the "PC" one always be created as after a conversion, 
even if it is of the correct version.
- a conversion overwrites alwasy the other file, so by having an old and 
new project, opening the old one converts it and overwrites the new one. 
A Message should warn the user so that his work is not lost.


GORM:
-----
- I cannot update an existing class by reparsing it. If I load the 
header of a class which has a new method added, re-loading it doesn't 
update it in Gorm, forcing to manually add an action/outlet. IB is 
smarter here and updates the new methos and warns for broken connections 
if one disappears.
- sometimes Gorm crashes when bringing it into the foreground and the 
menu (of the application being edited) is not visible and the "NSMenu" 
icon is clicked. I cannot easily reproduce this, but it happened me 
several times. Apparently it  it happens more easily when two or more 
projects are open inside Gorm

TextEdit:
---------
- the "show ruler" has no effect at all

GWorkspace:
-----------
- is the ddbd necessary? could its use be disabled for standard 
operation?
- is the creation of .gwdir unavoidable? if it is useful only for some 
specific function maybe if could be requested (and created) only when 
that one is used
- when moving a file to the trash, even with the keyboard shortcut, the 
confirmaiton panel comes up without focus, this disables keyboard 
aknwoledge by typing "enter" to confirm
- could the "hidden files" feature be extended (or if it already can, 
how do I do it?) to hide or show all standard unix hidden files, 
i.e. .* ?
- when I ampty the trash, the available disk space is not updated


overall the experience is good... although I tried to convince a friend 
to adopt GNUstep as his workspace and essentiaÚlly the main  question 
was "but what applications do I run with it" and so we have again that 
ever-recurring issue.

Cheers,
        Riccardo
        (aka grey gandalf on #GNUstep)