Re: Call for volunteers: Backporting mySTEP changes

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 12 Mar 2007, at 08:34, Xavier Glattard wrote:

> Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer <at> gmx.de> writes:
> (...)
> > 3. Changes to GNUstep
> >
> > mySTEP has a few correction and additions to methods that are already
> > implemented in GNUstep. We should try to extract as much of these as
> > possible. On the other hand have we fixed a lot of bugs in GNUstep  
> > since
> > the fork. We don't want to loose these fixes. Quite often there  
> > are also
> > two independent implementations of methods in GNUstep and mySTEP,  
> > so no
> > benefit may be gained by merging them.
> >
> > This surely is the hardest case and should be done very carefully.
> (...)
>
> I guess NSApplication and NSRunLoop stuff are in this category.
> I had a quick look in myStep with a diff tool (on NSApplication and
> NSRunLoop)and it seems all has been rewritten... Is there anything to
> extract ? Or should it be better not to change anything ?
> I mean : is there any 'political' point of view about this part of
> GNUstep ?

I don't know about NSApplication, but I agree that there is nothing  
to extract from myStep for NSRunLoop.

This is probably the case with a lot of classes because myStep was  
based on an old fork of GNUstep which had a lot of stuff  
(particularly code aimed at portability and efficiency) removed from  
it.  So ... the source code of NSRunLoop in myStep is a lot smaller  
and simpler, but the code in GNUstep supports mswindows and runs  
faster and is scalable to support server processes with thousands of  
input sources on unix/linux (it's limited by the capacity of the wait  
for multiple objects api on windows).

I think what we need to concentrate on are the changes made by Dr  
Nikolaus Schaller .... where he has re-created code which was removed  
from GNUstep in the original fork (and the recreated code may  be  
interesting) or has implemented new stuff added more recently by  
Apple.  Unfortunately it's not clear to me how we can find out which  
classes he's improved other than by inspection of each file.

We also need to be careful about cross-platform portability.  We  
ought to be able to enhance it by adding support for ARM processors  
from mySTEP, but I think that GNUstep is already more portable in  
that it's been targeted at a larger variety of processors and is  
64bit-clean, (the fork on which myStep is based was certainly not  
64bit clean or targetted at portability to different processors).   
This means that, while we should look for fixes for ARM portability  
to incorporate, we should not assume that myStep code is generally  
portable.  I imagine it has been written with that intent, but it's  
not tested to the same degree across multiple machine/os combinations.
In particular, it does not try to run on mswindows at all, so there  
are probably areas of code for which we need to write an mswindows  
implementation.