Re: gnustep/base modifications for OSX

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, January 28, 2003, at 03:30  pm, Adam Fedor wrote:

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> > From: Stéphane Corthésy <stephane@sente.ch>
> > Date: Mon Jan 27, 2003  5:14:55 PM America/Denver
> > To: Adam Fedor <fedor@doc.com>
> > Subject: Re: gnustep/base modifications for OSX
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > First, an important question: why do GCArray and GCMutableArray 
> > implement -mutableCopyWithZone: as a deep copy, i.e. content is 
> > copied, not retained??? NSArray and NSMutableArray don't do that. 
> > This might break applications (and in fact it did: I couldn't run my 
> > GDL2 tests until I discovered that).

I've changed that (for consistency with our other classes) ... but it's 
not a bug as such.

The MacOS-X release notes on copying containers specifically say you 
should *NOT* assume anything about whether a copy is shallow or deep 
... so an application which depends on a specific behavior is broken!   
In particular, some of the abstract class copy method implementations 
differ from those of the concrete classes!

If an application needs a specific behavior, it should not copy an 
array, but rather should use retain, or should create a new array and 
initialise it using -initWithArray:copyItems: setting the flag to say 
whether items should be copied or merely retained (the same applies to 
dictionaries and sets).