Re: Compatibility with OSX

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Friday, November 23, 2001, at 06:20 PM, Ludovic Marcotte wrote:

> > Also, if you, by accident, set a nil value you program crashes.
> > Personally I think a GUI library should not do this.
> > nil is perfectly fine and GNUstep should try to cope with it
> > as gracefully as it can.  I rather have an empty field
> > than a crash.
>
> The problem is that your program will crash under OS-X.
>
> So, when you'll port your app to OS-X (if you do), you'll end up trying
> to find where your do your setValue: nil and you'll fix that in your
> code to prevent this. That's awkward because you could have seen that
> problem right away under GNUstep.
>
> We want OS-X compatibility and this change is to make porting your app
> easier to OS-X.

That's actually a very poor justification for it ... we have debug 
logging
macros/functions to deal with this sort of case.  In the past our 
principle
has been to try our best to keep the program running, but when built for
debug, generate warnings when there are MacOS-X incompatibilities like 
this.

Generating a warning message is just as useful for maintaining 
compatibility
as crashing is, but carrying on running is much better for people who do 
not
care about porting to MacOS-X