Re: import vs include Re: Porting autogsdoc to OSX

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, February 26, 2002, at 10:43 PM, Helge Hess wrote:
> I'm also amazed that MIME and XML functionality is put into gstep-base. 
> Why does a *Foundation* library require XML and MIME functionality ??? 
> Hm. Gstep-base is IMHO radically violating the one major feature of 
> OpenStep, portability between Foundations. That way you will never 
> reach MacOSX developers ...

I guess you must have missed it ... NSURL supports http stuff (mime type 
headers) and suchlike,
and the new property list format is XML, and bth NSURL and property 
lists are part of MacOS-X
Foundation.
So ... far from breaking portability, inclusion of this functionality is 
critical for ensuring
portability with MacOS-X (and we're looking at making this stuff readily 
usable from MacOS-X
apps as well as just usable internally by the base lbrary).  Ok, it's 
not portable with the
(effectively dead) OpenStep spec.

Sure, these are features that the old OPENSTEP and libFoundation 
Foundations lack, but I think
ensuring portability to/from MacOS-X is the first portability priority.

Also, OpenStep was never designed for 'portability between 
foundations' ... it was designed
for 'portability between platforms'.  In other words, the idea was to 
let NeXT and Sun deploy
on different hardware platforms and operating systems.

To the best of my knowledge there has never been portability between 
foundations -

OPENSTEP (NeXT) and OPENSTEP(Sun) were essentially the same codebase, 
not different foundations.
libFoundation has never tried to fully implement the OpenStep spec, and 
has added some
OPENSTEP/MacOS stuff and a little stuff of its own.
GNUstep has pretty fully implemented OpenStep and MacOS-X, but always 
added a lot of
its own stuff.
MacOS-X has dropped some OpenStep stuff, and added lots of its own stuff.