From:	 dennis@made-it.com
To:	 discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
Subject: GNUstep Weekly Editorial 22-03-2002
Date:	 Fri, 22 Mar 2002 05:40:57 +0100


                            Editorial 22 March 2002
                                       
   The most important announcement this week came just after the last
   editorial. The initial launch of the GNUstep developers release. And
   we start off with version 1.3.0 for gnustep-make and gnustep-base.
   
   So we now have a 'stable'-tree and an 'unstable'-tree and we have CVS
   and it's daily snapshots. What more reasons do you need to try
   GNUstep!
   
   Why would one use unstable? For this release I would say, if you want
   GNUstep on Windows and you don't want CVS, go with the developers
   release.
   
Mailing lists

   The Apple patches against gcc3 saga continues. Stan Shebs from Apple
   send in some patches for gcc3 to better handle compiling on GNU/Linux,
   with thanks to Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf for forwarding the message to
   the GNUstep list.
   
   Ludovic Marcotte is planning on the release of GNUmail.app 1.0.0
   
   And then a nice long thread went on after Adam proposed a change in
   the GNUstep backend structure. His idea is to split the backend in a
   windowing server and a graphics system, since for graphics all kinds
   of libraries can be used, while the windowing system is more or less a
   static feature. As one might have expected when it comes down to
   choosing which graphics library should be supported first, the
   discussion went on...
   
Code changes

   Nicola Pero provided the gnustep-make package with a new handy script
   called GNUstep-reset.sh, which resets all things set by GNUstep.sh. He
   also created the ability to provide before-$(GNUSTEP_INSTANCE)-install
   and after-$(GNUSTEP_INSTANCE)-install. Richard Frith-Macdonald added
   more cygwin support.
   
   Richard Frith-Macdonald made my life easier for the changes in
   gnustep-base. I can now just do copy-and-paste. Here it goes:
   Rewritten low level support for different character encodings ...
   should provide more efficient and maintainable conversion between
   encodings and permit use of wide character encodings and encodings
   with multibyte sequences as the default C string encoding. Testing ...
   minimal ... we could do with decent tests for this stuff. So this
   version must be viewed as possibly very unstable!
   And he made gdnc and gdomap run as daemons under Windows.
   
   In gnustep-gui Pierre-Yves Rivaille created initial drag'n'drop
   support fo NSTableView and NSOutlineView. Adam applied a patch from
   Yen-Ju Chen to handle big5 encoding.
   
   Happy Stepping,
   Dennis Leeuw