Re: ANNOUNCE: Request For Proposals

[Dan Pascu]

On 11 Oct, Chris B. Vetter wrote:
> Another example would be Window Maker. It used to rely on
> libPropList - now with version 0.7.0 that code has been merged
> into WINGs, making libPropList (for WMaker) obsolete.

we had very different reasons to remove the libPropList dependency,
than becoming a 'pure' environment or reducing the number of libraries
used. also libPropList was not merged in WINGs, it was completely
rewritten.

the reasons we had were the fact that libPropList was no longer
maintained and it mixed concepts from property lists with concepts from
user defaults. those user defaults borrowed concepts did conflict with
the retain/release mechanism and even now one can make a libPropList
based program crash by performing a certain given set of operations.
what is worse is that even if we knew about this problem it could not be
fixed without removing the borrowed conflicting concepts, which meant
to rewrite libPropList completely because they were part of its core.
this is why property list handling code was added to WINGs.

> 
> It's not the libraries, it's dependencies I'm worried about.
> 

-- 
Dan