[OGo-GNUstep-Port] Re: gstep-make upgrade

[Helge Hess]

Nicola Pero wrote:
> Maybe you should/could make a difference between what you ship as part of
> Skyrix and what you ship as part of OGo.

No, I see no difference in the issues here. OGo is not supposed to be 
unstable either and I won't allow patches which I think would make it 
that way.

> It seems that your points about commercial support and very stable
> releases make mostly sense for Skyrix as a business, shipping and
> supporting your customers.

This has todo with project quality and consistency, not with "commercial 
support".

> But other OGo users/developers should really be working with the latest
> gnustep-make, and patching the latest gnustep-make when they find
> problems.

OGo users should get a working and consistent version. OGo developers 
can use what they want - again, I do not think that the makefiles should 
be incompatible for development.

> For example, porting to other platforms (Windows, Apple, etc) is probably
> an interesting task for an OGo developer.

Yes, he can use gnustep-make 1.7.2 - unless you broke compatibility in 
just a year and without increasing the major version properly.

> And compared to 1.3.3, the latest gnustep-make includes a lot of work on
> native Apple and Windows support for example.  It doesn't make any sense
> to work on porting to such platforms basing your work on 1.3.3 - of course
> you should use the latest release.

I agree, yet, the actual choice of the gstep-make to be used is done at 
packaging time, not at development time.

> Btw, one reason why it takes you so long to upgrade to a new gnustep-make
> is that you do it so rarely.  It's more than one year you don't upgrade
> :-)

We turn in a circles here. I understand your interest in that topic, but 
this won't change my opinion. OGo will *not* act as a GNUstep playing 
field to get GNUstep stable. GNUstep can use OGo to try to accomplish 
that of course, but this is not OGo's task.

>>Is the experience of the SKYRIX staff still valid with the new release
>>or what tweaks are introduced?
> You are right in talking of the SKYRIX staff.  My recommendation would be
> to ship whatever version you are comfortable with as part of your SKYRIX
> package, while letting free software developers/users play and tweak with
> the latest versions - so that they iron out and solve the problems for you
> *before* you ship it commercially!

OGo is not supposed to be an uncontrolled playing area, it is supposed 
to produce industry grade, usable software.

OGo is also not very separate to SKYRiX as long as no other developers 
step in doing serious stuff in the required quality.

> At the end of the day, I'm just trying to have gnustep-make maintained in
> a single place rather than in two places, because I think that it is a
> much more efficient and effective way of maintaining it.  I'm open to
> discuss including OGo's specific patches in gnustep-make, or testing
> gnustep-make releases against OGo before release to make sure gnustep-make
> releases work with OGo, or any other measure which can help making the two
> projects work together.

The OGo project is not the GNUstep project. They relate to each other in 
some core technologies but are otherwise very different.
If this means maintaining a separate gstep-make because GNUstep is in 
flux, we'll do.

regards,
   Helge
-- 
http://www.opengroupware.org/