Re: FOSDEM and beyond (next stable release of base)

[David Chisnall]

On 15 Feb 2010, at 17:23, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> On 14 Feb 2010, at 14:53, David Chisnall wrote:
> 
>> On 9 Feb 2010, at 10:58, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
>> 
>>> Make a new 'stable' release (this year!) formally declared as OSX10.4 
>>> compatible ... possibly to be versioned as gnustep-base-10.4 for marketing 
>>> purposes.
>> 
>> 
>> Do we have a list somewhere of what is still to do towards this goal?  I'm 
>> not a huge fan of the concept of feature-parity releases, because I'd rather 
>> have classes from 10.6 that I do use than classes from 10.4 that I don't 
>> use, but if there's a list somewhere of what is still missing / incomplete 
>> in terms of compatibility then it would make it easy for people to work on 
>> small contributions (and give me something to do when I am bored and 
>> unmotivated).  
> 
> I don't think there *is* such a list.
> And actually, base may be as close to 10.5 as 10.4
> Probably we could do with some sort of compatibility table (perhaps on the 
> wiki) showing what classes we implement and which of the Apple releases they 
> correspond to.

I had a quick look at what we do have, and the biggest omission that I noticed 
was NSCalendar.  With 10.4, Apple deprecated NSCalendarDate and replaced it 
with a saner model.  NSDate now stores absolute times and NSCalendar is used to 
convert them for display.  

>> One thing that I noticed to be missing completely is NSLocale - perhaps 
>> someone familiar with how system locales are defined on our supported 
>> platforms could look at implementing this.
> 
> IIRC Adam implemented GSLocale (in base ages ago to handle locale stuff) ... 
> but its not public and its probabluy nothing much like NSLocale ... however, 
> it might be a good starting point.

I just had a look, and this file just contains a few functions, no GSLocale 
class.  It's pretty spartan; just a wrapper around the locale.h stuff (which, 
itself, is pretty primitive).  There's no way of enumerating the supported 
locales, for example (the only portable way of doing this on *NIX platforms is 
to run locale -a in an NSTask, which is quite ugly, and won't work on Windows). 
 

There is also no support for calendar stuff.  There don't seem to be any 
standard APIs for doing this, so for things like supporting the Buddhist, 
Islamic, Chinese, and so on calendars, we'd either need to add our own code for 
doing the conversions or introduce a new dependency.  

If someone can recommend a library that does these things already, then I'd 
suggest that we implement support for the Gregorian calendar (which most of our 
users will be using) ourselves and then add optional support for others if the 
library is present.

>> The release announcement should contain something like this:
>> 
>> 'Care has been taken in this release to ensure that all classes and methods 
>> shipped as part of the Foundation framework in OS X 10.4 are present.  
>> GNUstep development is demand-driven and a number of features from later 
>> versions of OS X are have been implemented, including several from 10.6.  We 
>> provide no guarantee in this release that any particular features from newer 
>> versions are present.'
> 
> Actually, I'm guessing we don't want to implement the scripting classes or 
> the libxml2 wrappers unless someone wants to contribute them (since we have 
> pre-existing alternatives for both, and no interest doing them).  Is there 
> anything else we might want to explicitly say we have no immediate intention 
> of working on/including?


I don't think so.  The XML stuff is nice to have if someone can be bothered to 
write it, but not something that I'd consider a priority (unless WebKit needs 
it?  Gregory?).  

David

-- Sent from my Cray X1