Re: FOSDEM and beyond (next stable release of base)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 9 Feb 2010, at 11:37, David Chisnall wrote:

> I'd like to move the ObjectiveC2 framework, which implements the new runtime 
> APIs on top of the old Apple ones, into a sub-framework of -base.  When you 
> compile with the new runtime, I'd like to make this an empty framework that 
> links against libobjc, but contains no code itself (other than a runtime.h 
> file that #includes <objc/runtime.h>).  When you compile with the old 
> runtime, it should provide the runtime.c / runtime.h files that wrap the old 
> code in the new code.  When you compile on OS X, it would not be linked at 
> all.

That sounds OK. ... do you want to import it into the 'reorg' branch of base?

I created the new branch because I know that a lot of people build from svn 
trunk and expect it to be stable ... but reorganisation of the code is likely 
to break things at various points.  Once the 'reorg' branch is reasonable 
stable I intend to copy it back to form trunk again.

>> Have a 'GNUstepBase/Additions.h' header (like Foundation/Foundation.h) to 
>> pull together all the extensions so we can easily change code to include it, 
>> or leave it out when compiling in strict OSX compatibility mode.
> 
> 
> Maybe we could have a <GNUstep/GNUstep.h>, which is like <Cocoa/Cocoa.h> but 
> also includes base and GUI additions?  Having a single header like this can 
> improve compile times a lot if we use precompiled headers.

I like that ... though currently we already have a GNUstep.h designed to just 
contain basic macros etc to let people build gnustep code on Apple systems.
I think we could change the file to be usable in both GNUstep and Apple worlds 
though (ie simply include all headers in GNUstep, and do the same plus include 
macros on Cocoa).

> It would also be nice if GNUstep Make could easily support a precompiled 
> header without needing custom rules.  Ideally, just setting whether you 
> wanted strict OS X compatibility, and what you were building would select the 
> correct header to precompile and would use -include to pre-include it in all 
> Objective-C source files.

You probably need to talk to Nicola about that ... sounds fairly easy though.