Re: Cocotron

[Tima Vaisburd]

On Tuesday 26 December 2006 03:37, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

> GNUstep tries to produce libraries which are fully MacOS-X
> compatible, and the emphasis of development is on 'fully' with
> completeness and correctness of the implementation being a major focus.

I do not want to sound dismissive or condescending.
There has been done a huge amount of an excellent work,
especially by Richard.

However.

These are noble goals. But:

1. Full compatibility with Mac OSX is impossible because
Mac OSX is a moving target. Tomorrow there will be a new version
with a new features that GNUstep would not support.

2. Current GNUstep implementation is incomplete with respect
to the interface. Moreover, as far as I understand, it's imcomplete
with every MacOS version - even the interface of Mac OS X 10.0
is not fully implemented (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I'm talking of AppKit (gui+back) here, of course. To my mind, the Foundation
alone is not enough to make the project impotrant, we need the whole thing.

3. What's worse, current implementation is incomplete with respect of 
features.

I need an example here.

Imagine I want to manipulate an image and save the result into a file
(this is the only thing I've tried so far with Cocoa, my experience is 
obviously limited). Apple user guide says:
    To capture the contents of an existing view or image, use one of the
    following techniques:

    -  Lock focus on the desired object and use the initWithFocusedViewRect:
        method of NSBitmapImageRep.

     - In Mac OS X v10.4 and later, use the
       bitmapImageRepForCachingDisplayInRect: and
       cacheDisplayInRect:toBitmapImageRep: methods of NSView.

So, if I'm not porting existing program, but writing a new one, I can live
without a second implementation if I have a working first. Unfortunately,
from the result of -initWithFocusedViewRect: I could not get TIFF 
representation - it did not worked with art backend. It worked with xlib, 
however, with xlib the image rotation did not work.

Therefore, there was (then, and maybe still is) no way to write image editing
since no combination of existing parts led to a satisfactory result.

This is what I mean by feature incompleteness.

I believe the programmers porting their software from Cocoa (though I hardly
see why would they) need interface completeness. The programmers
writing new programs need at least feature completeness.

It seems, right now GNUstep provides neither.

So what are we offering to the users? There is no wonder
they are starting their own OPENSTEP implementations.


I think the way to go is to decrease the scope of the project:
to sacrifice (maybe temporarily) the cross-platform multi-OS nature
of gnustep in favor to inteface completeness to a given Mac OS X version
(10.4.6 - am I right with the number? - is awesome but even 10.0 will be fine)
working smooth on one particular Unix OS/machine combination.

Thank you for your patience.
--Tima