Re: XML idea

[Helge Hess]

On Jan 7, 2004, at 2:41 PM, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > Of course. Did someone ever talk with Ovidiu (which probably holds 
> > the Copyright on most stuff) before rewriting everything
> >  I'm pretty sure it would have not been an issue for him to assign 
> > copyright.
> > Sigh ...
> I believe the issue of  getting the copyright assigned was looked into 
> and there were idealogical reasons for the copyright holders not doing 
> it.

I think "believe" can be safely translated with "no". Anyway - no need 
to elaborate on this ;-)

> > But on the other side the question is whether Apple extensions always 
> > belong into Foundation and not into Foundation-additions? I think it 
> > is important that GNUstep makes a statement on this, so that I know 
> > what classes I can safely use between Cocoa, gstep-base and 
> > libFoundation.
>
> If it's in additions, it's also in base ... since a build of the base 
> library incorporates additions.

I cannot follow you on that. If I do link against -lgstep-base, do I 
get the additions or not?

> If it's in additions, you should be able to use it in MacOS-X either 
> natively or by using the additions library.

I'm only interested in things which are available on MacOS-X natively.

> I really don't think you can produce a definitive statement on new 
> MacOS-X features ... they keep changing.

So there should be a procedure on how to deal with that. Eg I think 
there is some agreement that AppleScript things are not being added to 
gstep-base. Probably we need a 
supported/optional/unsupported/not-yet-implemented list.

> Some we might want to incorporate directly into the base library 
> (probably most changes to existing classes and new classes we think 
> are really well designed), others we might put in the additions 
> library for compatibility but not treat as 'core'.

Yes, I understand. The point is that it is not transparent to the 
gstep-base user what one is allowed to use in cross-platform code and 
what not.

> In other words, I think that if/when we get contributions of MacOS-X 
> classes we don't particularly like, we could put them in the additions 
> library, and document them as unsupported or semi-supported ... 
> meaning that the core developers would give low priority to their 
> support.

This just doesn't make sense to me. If it isn't supported, I can't use 
it. If it requires additional libraries, I probably won't use it.

regards,
  Helge
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