Re: NSMenu* and NSPopuUp* issues

[Alexander Malmberg]

David Ayers wrote:
> Hello Alex,
> 
> I almost agree... I think it will become important to support win32
> menus for ease of porting existing OPENSTEP Enterprise implementations
> and user acceptance of a menu scheme differing from all other apps on
> that plattform.

If GNUstep was trying to blend in with the native environment, this
would make sense, but it isn't. Consistency with the native interface
vs. consistency across platforms. We have the latter.

> I believe the actual menu structure is encoded in .nib
> files, so they will have to be touched anyways when porting. This could
> have been a reason why projects always needed seperate
> Wiindows/Next-style nib file so we would also need to create seperate
> .gorm files for horizontal menus I guess...

But as an application developer, I'm not going to try to design an app
for n different interface styles.

> (Hmm actually I'm not so
> sure they were sructured diffrently, I'll have to check again.) Given
> Renaisance, a mechanism for defining portable menus seems in reach, so I
> think it would be great if GNUstep could find some maintainable way to
> support horizontal menus. But I must agree that we shouldn't burden
> maintainablity for the standard GNUstep menu scheme unproportionatly.

-gui maintainability is important, but I'm more concerned with app
development and maintainability, and the chaos that will ensue when half
our apps are written for one menu style and half for some other style.
(And if you bring in windows, it's actually worse since there are three
styles: vertical, horizontal macos-style, and horizontal windows-style.)

> Cheers,
> Dave

- Alexander Malmberg