Re: Is there going to be a release soon?

[David Chisnall]

On 21 Nov 2008, at 23:01, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> Adam Fedor wrote:
> > On Nov 21, 2008, at 9:05 AM, hns@computer.org <mailto:hns@computer.org 
> > >
> > wrote:
> > > And one thing makes me wonder a little: why is it still a 0.15
> > > release? After so many years of work.
> > > From a marketing view this looks like an instable experiment and not
> > > as something that can be used in daily work.
> > I'd like to see that as well.
>
> For a long time I have been reluctant to move on to a 1.0 release of
> GNUstep gui, but we may almost be there. Perhaps we could define what
> should go into such a release and which non-coding conditions should  
> be
> met (for examples the amount of test coverage) and then try to reach
> these conditions early in 2009?
> Just tagging the current release with a 1.0 stamp (or even higher)  
> still
> looks wrong to me.

For a 1.0 release, I would expect:

- OS X 10.0 compatibility in every class.
- A stable ABI that will be supported for several stable releases.

I believe GNUstep is close to the first one - I certainly haven't  
found any OS X methods that I've wanted to use and that were  
introduced prior to 10.3 that haven't been present in GNUstep for a  
while.

The stable ABI requires each of the classes to be examined to see what  
is likely to need to be added to them in the future, and making sure  
there is space for them in classes, or using class clusters and  
private classes for things that are likely to be expanded in the future.

David