Re: Intermediate Summary: Re: GNUstep.org website redesign proposal

[Sebastian Reitenbach]

On Wednesday, January 8, 2014 14:47 CET, Stefan Bidi <address@hidden> wrote: 
 
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 3:14 AM, Riccardo Mottola <address@hidden
> > wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > I would not like to do that, we remain "runtime neutral", the runtime is a
> > dependency. You can use GCC with its GNU runtime, if you use Clang you must
> > install libobjc2, but you can (or at least, could, I did that a couple of
> > months ago) to use GCC+libobjc2.
> >
> 
> The point I was trying to make is that some of the features GNUstep
> implements are highly dependent on the runtime.  Have 2 competing runtimes
> with slightly incompatible implements of the Objective-C language might be
> confusing.  If both implementations are going to be supported, we need to
> be very explicit as to which features we support with one and the other.
> Stating "GNUstep supports all modern Objective-C features, including ARC
> and blocks" is only half true because we only support those features if the
> correct runtime and compiler are in use.  Not to mention, some of these
> features are only supported by specific versions of the compilers.  The
> current Debian stable, for example, includes clang 3.0 only, and if I
> remember correctly, this version doesn't support certain runtime features.
> A few years back I also temporarily switch to Slackware and it still
> doesn't officially support clang/llvm.

With regard to the runtime, we should recommend to use clang/libobjc2, 
for people that want to use those shiny new features.
For people that for whatever reason cannot or want not use clang/libobjc2, 
or have too old versions, it should be stated that GNUstep still can run/work,
but it will not support all the features.
I don't know, some unambigous matrix showing what features are available with 
a given compiler/runtime combination.

Sebastian

> 
> I know a significant number of GNUstep developers use and actively support
> the BSDs (I develop corebase on a Debian Testing machine, and boot into
> FreeBSD to test), however, you still need to admit that GNU/Linux is the
> most used FOSS OS on desktops.