[DotGNU]DG-Base matters

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

this e-mail is intented to get DG-Base up-to-speed, it can also serve as a
declaration of the goals of DotGNU-Base.

DotGNU-Base is an extension library, it extends the functionality in the ECMA
compatible base lib in a DotGNU way. It is not it's goal however to extend .NET
framework functionality, instead it is an alternative for .NET framework
functionality. This is of course not an iron rule, I can imagine using a few
handy .NET classes while programming (as long as they are in a Free Sofware
library). 

A good reason for this is the reason DG-Base was originaly created, .NET is not
exactly the API of the century. It's very likely that .NET is build around MS
systems and is thus less efficient for GNU systems as a DotGNU library. Of
course this will be compensated for wherever possible in pnetlib, but if the
specs are bad the implementation can't help very much.

There is also a political reason not to use too much .NET in DG-Base. If we
build DG-Base as a Free Software shell around .NET features people will think we
just copy MS and then pretend it's our own work (somehow this reminds me of a
certain company) but if we build DG-Base on the bare ECMA compatible ground
people will see we are a real alternative.

DotGNU-Base is besides an extension library also a base library, it will be kind
of mandatory to have it if you want to use DotGNU programs. DG-Base can however
be dependend on other DotGNU base libraries such as DotGNU.Xml (this is a base
lib since XML functionality is vital for DotGNU). DG-Base could itself also
contain P/Invoke functionality (we can simply not compile some classes if the
libraries they link to aren't available so it won't cause trouble building). I'm
thinking for example of the assimilation of dotgnu.pm into the lib as the Regex
class, we need a Regex class anyway for address@hidden

It's my goal to make all standard GNU functionality available through DG-Base.
This means a lot of P/Invoke work, luckily this isn't very hard so it's a good
change for newbies to help :-).

Now to the up-to-speed part. The most important part of DG-Base is the protocols
section. The following protocols have a high priority:

* HTTP
* STMP
* POP3
* NNTP
* Jabber (if it hasn't been implemented somewhere else 
          this has a very high priority)

That all folks.

Greetings,

Peter