Re: Objective-C 2.0 and other new features in Leopard

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Nov 2007, at 14:02, Stefan Bidigaray wrote:

> On Nov 13, 2007 2:14 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald  
> <richard@tiptree.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Actually, the current code (since about 18 months ... before the
> 1.13.0 release) already allows you to set up system-wide defaults by
> putting them in the GNUstep.conf file (and/or on a per-user basis by
> putting them in the user's GNUstep.conf file).
> However, the defaults added there are limited by the parsing rules of
> that file (which is sourced by /bin/sh and make) so you can
> occasionally have a situation where an app uses a default name which
> can't be configured that way.
>
> Hmm, this seems promising!  Is there any documentation on how to  
> get this set?  Seeing as most distros would only need to set  
> NSGlobalDomain defaults (for things such as NSInterfaceStyle,  
> NSMeasurementUnit, etc) I think this is already very powerful, and  
> useful.

It's documented (poorly I guess)  in the main base library  
documentation (Base.gsdoc/Base.html) under the docmentation of the  
gNUstep.conf file.

Basically ...


GNUSTEP_EXTRA=foo,bar

Says we have two extra keys to go in the defaults system ... foo and bar

foo=fibble
bar=feep

Defines the values for those two extra keys.

Actually, another limitation is that these keys can only be  
strings ... so we really ought to implement a fully functional global  
defaults mechanism ... but really that's quite simple, we could just  
have GNUstep.conf specify a property list file (eg GNUstep.plist)  
stored in the same location as GNUstep.conf and parse that at the  
same time as parsing the GNUstep.conf