Re: Is keyed archives portable between Cocoa and GNUstep ?

[Fred Kiefer]

Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
> Since GNUstep can read and write nib file,
> I wonder whether it means the keyed archives are portable between
> Cocoa and GNUstep ?
> In another word, if I have objects key-encoded with GNUstep,
> can it be read with the same program building with Cocoa ?
> I look at the nib file, which is supposed to be keyed archived,
> and it seems to be in some kind of  binary format.
> 

Don't let this binary format worry you. GNUstep supports both the binary
and the XML format used by Cocoa for keyed coding.
Are keyed archives then portable between GNUstep and Cocoa? As usuals,
it depends :-)
It depends on the class being archived having a full GNUstep
implementation for keyed archiving and de-archiving. For many of the
Foundation and AppKit classes this should already be the case, but for
some the whole implementation or some details of it may be missing. Here
you can only try and find out for yourself. A simple test would be to
read in a Cocoa archive into GNustep and write it out again. If you find
all the information you need (plus something more as GNUstep may be a
bit too verbose) than you are on the save side. Otherwise we need to add
the missing bits to GNUstep, which is not to hard as soon as we know
what is missing.

Cheers,
Fred