Re: Cocotron

[Helge Hess]

On Dec 24, 2006, at 02:00, Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
>  But I don't understand the difficulty of merging libFoundation and
> GNUstep-base.

Well, then just do it! :-) It doesn't make a lot of sense to argue  
about it, if its trivial, just demonstrate it :-)

In the past I have often posted the issues we encountered, but some  
of the problematic areas are:
a) KVC support
b) FHS support
c) release policies (aka no stable releases promoted)
d) various minors
e) packaging

SOPE/OGo works perfectly fine on libFoundation *and* Cocoa, but it  
doesn't work with GNUstep. Now its quite some research work to find  
out why and fix it.

>  I believe it can also support the extension in libFoundation if  
> someone asks.

Neither SOPE nor OGo depend on libFoundation. In fact both work just  
fine on Cocoa.

>  But if license is the issue, there is almost nothing people can do.

I'm fine with LGPL, this was never a point for me. I don't know  
whether it was a strong point for Ovidiu when he started  
libFoundation, but I don't think so.

>  As for the place to install (/usr/loca/lib or GNUstep/System/ 
> Libraries),
>  gnustep-base works on both ways with right settings.

Even if this is the case (nobody seems to use it!) producing packages  
which install it properly also takes some more days(/weeks).
I certainly can't write gnustep-make packages which install my  
software into /usr/local out of the box? I probably need to manually  
move gnustep-base and do all the right settings etc?

As a rough guess I think it would take about 2...4 weeks to get a  
(deployable) port. Its the typical 90/10 rule that the last 10% take  
90% the time. We don't need a prototype showing SOPE/OGo running on  
gstep-base, but a solid solution meeting basic QA expectations.

Actually I do think that gstep-base is slowly improving (adding FHS  
etc), but I suppose the issue is that the core developers have a  
different viewpoint on it (ie they don't think that proper FHS  
support or Unix/Linux integration is crucial etc).


Anyways. If someone wants to do the port, you are very welcome and of  
course you will get assistence. I still consider it a goal to move to  
gstep-base, but at the current pace this will take some additional 3  
years. Probably we have moved to Mono till then ;->

Greets,
  Helge