Re: Two random thoughts

[Fred Kiefer]

Chris B. Vetter wrote:
> On 12/16/05, Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
>>> to better support the development of Appkit bundles, wouldn't it make
>>> sense to 'offer' an additional header directory that includes header
>>> files found in gnustep-back, and put them in Headers/gnustep/back/ ?
>> could you please explain what you are trying to achive? What sort of
>> AppKit bundles are you thinking of and what would these use the backend
>> headers for?
> 
> 'Inofficial' backends, that is, those that aren't included in
> gnustep-back. Right now, if you want to work on a project that does
> need to override anything in XG*.h you will need to manually copy
> those files over to your project tree so they can get included. That
> may make it pretty... incompatbile to other releases.
> 
>> The different backend currently offer different internal functionality,
>> by making this differences publicly accessible we would enforce
>> applications that only work with some backends. Which looks like a bad
>> thing to me.
> 
> Yes, I agree. OTOH, then there shouldn't be any Headers/gnustep/...
> include directory.
> As I see it, anything 'under' Headers/gnustep/... isn't supposed to be
> used in a regular / 'normal' project anyway.

I can see your point now. But I must state that I never liked these
header files in Headers/GNUstepGUI and Headers/GNUstepBase, which are
the current names for these directories, too much. We need them to make
certain classes available for the next lever of GNUstep modules and some
even to applications. Even now there are a few files in there in the
GNUstepGUI directory, where I don't see much reason, why they are public
(the whole layout stuff, for example).

As for your requirement to have some of the XG header files available,
why don't you just create links to these files? And in the long run your
backend may hopefully make it into CVS (or which ever version control
system we may be using at that time).