Re: Wording on www.gnustep.org

[Robert Slover]

Lars,

I believe “is portable” has a slightly different and more accurate meaning in 
this case. The difference mostly comes down to intent. 

If something “is portable”, it is designed that way from the beginning. For 
example, a “portable stereo” is of a very different design than a “home stereo” 
system. 

Software that “has been ported” may never have been intended to run on the 
systems and architectures it now runs on. For example, parts of one of the 
commercial products I work on were originally written for IBM CP/67 and were 
eventually ported to younger dinosaurs like SunOS, Ultrix, and OSF/1 and later 
still, IBM AIX and Solaris. Along the way it was “ported to” various UIs 
including text terminals, X/Motif, and HTML. It “has been ported” to GNU/Linux 
about 13-14 years ago. Note that, it would be nearly as much work (or even 
more) to get it to run on one of those older systems again - porting it in each 
case meant adapting it to its new environments and making it fit in as well as 
possible there, and in some cases cutting out, discarding, and replacing the 
parts that didn’t fit. 

I think in GNUStep’s case, the intent is clearly to support application code 
meant to be “portable” to many environments.

—Robert

> On Nov 11, 2024, at 05:46, lars.sonchocky-helldorf@hamburg.de wrote:
> 
> Hi Riccardo (and all other GNUsteppers),
> 
> 
> On https://www.gnustep.org/ it says on the top:
> 
> A Framework suited for development of advanced GUI desktop applications or 
> server applications. It closely follows Apple's Cocoa APIs and is portable to 
> a variety of platforms and architectures.
> 
> Nitpick: wouldn’t it be better if it said „has been ported“ instead of „is 
> portable“?
> 
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
>    Lars