Re: GNUstep <-> Cocoa compatibility

[Artem Baguinski]

On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 12:28:32PM +0100, Fred Kiefer wrote:
> Hi Artem,
> 
> due to the festive season trafic on this mailing list is a bit low, so I 
> try to answer your mail until somebody with more experiance in the 
> Cocoa-GNUstep porting is available again. 

thanx

> Keep in mind that I don't have access to an Apple MacOSX computer!

me neither. and i'm trying to avoid it as much as possible - that's why
i'm here :)

> >it's not the first time I consider to learn GNUstep - i saw presentation
> >of [i guess Adam] at the first FOSDEM (when it still was called OSDEM)
> >and was quite facinated by the Objective-C and Foundation/GNUstep base.
> >But i haven't had an opprtunity to use it after - alas. 
> I think Adam was giving his great talk on the second FOSDEM, but never 
> mind.
could be, i went to the second one as well. but nerver mind ;)

> >As i understood from documents, Cocoa and GNUstep are both
> >implementations of OpenStep but Cocoa being proprietary (?)
> >implementation evolves while GNUstep tries to be nice. Does that mean
> >GNUstep application may have problems running on MAC OS X and using
> >Cocoa libraries? 
> >
> This depends on what you want to do. If you just take the GNUstep code 
> and suply a new NIB file for MacOSX not many problems should be 

hmm, GUIs of applications i write are usually either simple enough to be coded
"manually" instead of being designed in an IB/GORM or aims to be dynamic
and complex enough to be generated on fly from underlying data model
instead of being designed ... 

does this make job of porting my [hynothetical] GNUstep application to
cocoa easier?

> expected. Even better, if you write your Application with Renaissance, 
> than it is protable right from the start.
> If you on the other hand want to use the GNUstep GUI on top of MacOSX 
> there are still some problems to be expected.

i rather want the following: develop an application in GNU environment
until i'm satisfied with it, checkout it from cvs onto MacOSX machine
and build it to run on MacOS. 

the source tree will contain c/objective-c sources and GNUmakefile and
some images, will i need something else to make it build and integrate
itself into MacOS?

> Porting the other way, from Cocoa to GNUstep may be more difficult as 
> Cocoa has further evoloved and you may easyly be using classes more 
> methods that are not available for GNUstep.

i don't think i'll ever have to do that...

> >Another question is how consistent the interface of GNUstep application
> >is when run in Cocoa environment? As I figured from this month's mails
> >in the archive the widgets have to draw themselves, does this mean
> >GNUstep windows will look very different from "native" cocoa windows, or
> >will the gnustep application use "native" widgets when built and run to
> >use cocoa libraries?
> >
> See above. Best thing is to only transfer the code.

sorry i don't understand this one. the question was "if i transfer only
the code, will the result of 'make install' feel like a normal OSX
application to OSX user, or will it rather feel like some weird
curiosity?" ;-) 

i guess i'm expecting the answer from somebody using GNUstep
applications on MacOS X here though...

> 
> >Are there any applications out there that look equally consistent when
> >run in WindowMaker + GNUstep environment and aqua + cocoa?
> >

-- 
gr{oe|ee}t{en|ings}
artm