Re: .gorm vs .gmodel

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, February 11, 2002, at 10:02 AM, Stephen Brandon wrote:

> Hi,
>
> sorry if this is a stupid question, but I am (still) puzzled about the
> difference between .gorm and .gmodel files.
>
> Let's say I use nib2gmodel to convert some nibs to gmodels for an app 
> or two.
> If these gmodels sit in the same directory as the nibs, then if I 
> compile on
> GNUstep instead of MacOSX, will the gmodel files get automatically 
> picked up
> and used instead of the nibs?

Think so ... I'd have to check ... certainly that should be the case.

> And with gorm files, does the same thing apply? If they sit, for 
> example, in
> English.lproj, do they get picked up in the same way as nibs?

Yes. I *think* the preference is to use a .gorm first and a .gmodel if no
.gorm file exists.

> So what I am asking is if GNUstep is able to natively use gorm and 
> gmodel
> files as nib replacements.

Yes.

> And if that's the case, are the gorm and gmodel files actually of 
> identical
> format?

No.
A .gorm is like a .nib ... an archive of objects using the standard 
NSCoder
stuff - storing all relevent ivars such that objects can be reproduced
exactly.  The .gmodel format tries to abstract out the logical 
characteristics
of objects in a system independant way.  It has to have additional
encoding/decoding methods written for each class.  It tries to achieve a
degree of portability between GNUstep and OPENSTEP/MacOS-X

> Lastly, is it possible in any way to open gmodels in Gorm.app for 
> editing?

Not until someone writes one.  It *should* be reasonable to have Gorm 
read/write
gmodels - I don't see any difficulty in it (but I'm not very familiar 
with the
gmodel format) - it might involve a loss of information in comparison 
with
.gorm files, but I'm sure that the .gmodel could be extended to deal 
with that.