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Apple’s archiving format is proprietary and not documented, so this poses a problem for anyone wanting to implement compatibility with it. However, even if we reverse engineered the format, there are enough differences between the class and ivar layouts to make this sort of compatibility difficult. Not to mention the fact that we would constantly have to keep up with the changes Apple made.
The new keyed archiving using XML file formats is much more portable, and GNUstep is trying to maintain compatibility with Apple with this type of archiving.