Re: NSCharacterSet bloat?

[Derek Zhou]

Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> writes:

> On 23 Jan 2006, at 20:20, Derek Zhou wrote:
> 
> > Hi all,
> > It looks like now NSCharacterSet in base (1.11.2) contains more than
> > 600k of const static data (all the NSCharacterSet bitmaps). To put
> > thing in persective, it is more than 25% of the total TEXT size of the
> > compiled libgnustep-base.so file. I check base-1.9.1 I had from a
> > while ago, base used to store them in files (they still exist, just
> > out of date) and read them in on demand. IMO, the old behavior is much
> > saner. Embedding large data structure in the source code just don't
> > look right to me. Why do we made this change? If the concern is to
> > share the bitmaps among multiple app instances, we can mmap them
> > instead of read them anyway.
> 
> This is because some people (windows users primarily) voiced
> objections to the dependencies on other files and wanted to minimise
> the number of files installed.  Many times I got the impression that
> objections are aesthetic, but the idea of minimising the number of
> external resources that can be misplaced and break things seems
> reasonable.  Now it sounds like you have your own aesthetic
> objections to the new way of doing things, I guess you can't please
> everyone.

Minimizing files that can be misplaced and break things? Hey, that's
how NSBundle get invented! And 13 files are not a whole lot anyways. I
think the only real reason here is some people do not want to run the
GNUstep script prior of running GNUstep apps. It maybe possible for
non-gui apps, but do we support that?     
Yes, my opinion is purely aesthetic. And it is aesthetic factor that
make me appreciate gnustep. 
> 
> > Also the file NSCharacterSetData.h seems like auomatically generated
> > by some program and I cannot find the program in the base
> > tarball. Inconvienence aside, it is also against common practices of
> > distributing free software.
> 
> The charsets are provided both in the header files in the source code
> and (less readably) in the old data files.
> The location of the utilities used to generate the files is given in
> the readme file in the NSCharacterSets directory containing those
> data files.

If that is not too big, can we merge them into base or make? 

Derek