Re: NSKeyedArchiver/NSKeyedUnarchiver (was Re: GModel decision)

[Gregory John Casamento]

Richard,

--- Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 20 Jan 2004, at 02:28, Alexander Malmberg wrote:
> 
> > Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> >> Yep ... especially time consuming as we want to reverse engineer the
> >> encoding of the apple classes .. which, as the internal structures of
> >> our classes differ from Apples,  might mean we are archiving different
> >> information to what the current methods do, and reconstructing the
> >> information we need from that.
> >
> > Just to clarify: this seems to imply that you think that GNUstep's
> > encoders/decoders should be _directly_ compatible with apple archives,
> > which seems like a Very Bad Idea (as opposed to writing a standalone
> > translator, which is a separate project). Is this really what you 
> > meant?
> 
> Yes.  There are people who want MacOS-X compatibility ... and I don't
> think they should be willfully denied that option.

No one is saying that they should be denied this option.   But that's exactly
what it should be, an option. 

I am very much for crossplatform compatibility, but I believe that we should
archive our classes in a natural way and should not compute/derive values which
should be used during archiving or unarchiving in our classes based on what
Apple has stored in thier archives.   In some cases what we archive and what
they archive for a given class are very different.

This is not to mention the fact that (and this goes *entirely* without saying,
but I will anyways) files saved from Gorm which are .nib files will be expected
to be readable on every version of Mac OS X.   Thankfully, I've got 10.2 and
I'm about to get 10.3, but it won't be easy to maintain compatibility in the
future.

> The downside of doing it would be more complex and less efficient code
> for reading/writing keyed archives ... but that's a localised issue 
> those people can deal with without impacting on the rest of the system.
> Non-keyed archives would be unchanged of course.

Naturally.

GJC

=====
Gregory John Casamento -- CEO/President Open Logic Corp.
-- bheron on #gnustep, #linuxstep, & #gormtalk ---------------- 
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