On 9 Feb 2010, at 10:58, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
Make a new 'stable' release (this year!) formally declared as
OSX10.4 compatible ... possibly to be versioned as gnustep-base-10.4
for marketing purposes.
Do we have a list somewhere of what is still to do towards this goal?
I'm not a huge fan of the concept of feature-parity releases,
because I'd rather have classes from 10.6 that I do use than classes
from 10.4 that I don't use, but if there's a list somewhere of what
is still missing / incomplete in terms of compatibility then it would
make it easy for people to work on small contributions (and give me
something to do when I am bored and unmotivated).
One thing that I noticed to be missing completely is NSLocale -
perhaps someone familiar with how system locales are defined on our
supported platforms could look at implementing this. This has
several knock-on effects; a number of methods that previously took an
NSString* now take an id which can be either an NSString* or an
NSLocale*. I made this change in NSNumber, but that was trivial as
it just passes the locale object to NSString; correct handling of the
locale in NSString is also needed.
I don't think we should call it gnustep-base-10.4 for one very simple
reason: we already have a lot of 10.5 and 10.6 stuff implemented. If
we call it 10.4, people will assume not only that stuff from 10.4
will work, but also that stuff from 10.5/6 won't work. Assuming that
10.4 stuff will work is good (well, as long as it's really true), but
we don't want to give people negative expectations: particularly now
you are seeing a lot of projects dropping 10.4 support, being seen as
ONLY feature-compatible with 10.4 would be a step backwards. The
release announcement should contain something like this:
'Care has been taken in this release to ensure that all classes and
methods shipped as part of the Foundation framework in OS X 10.4 are
present. GNUstep development is demand-driven and a number of
features from later versions of OS X are have been implemented,
including several from 10.6. We provide no guarantee in this release
that any particular features from newer versions are present.'
David
-- Sent from my PDP-11
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