Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

Hi,

it's funny and sad at the same time that we have such discussions every 
now and then...

On Saturday, April 5, 2003, at 01:40 PM, Helge Hess wrote:
<snip>
> a) does Cocoa add any *technical* instability or complexity ?
> No, absolutely not. IMHO Cocoa scripting classes and even 
> CoreFoundation *should* be added to gstep-base/gui to improve 
> compatiblity. If you don't want Scripting, don't use it, if you 
> consider it instable, don't use it. Almost anything in Cocoa are 
> *additions*, not incompatible changes affecting OpenStep > compatibility.

Well, I am not sure about that. What added value does CF offer compared 
to pure OpenStep? As far as I understand this API has been mainly 
introduced for previous Mac OS developers in order to help them bring 
their sources to Carbon and new Mac OS X technologies such as Quartz, 
as well as for Apple itself to have a common base layer for the Carbon 
and Cocoa worlds.

<snip>

> OK, now what I think GNUstep should be. IMHO the GUI thing should be 
> dropped altogether. Really !! (I know I'm going to get killed ;-)
>
> Why ? Because they are definitly not enough resources and there are 
> working (and implemented) solutions available for any platform. Some 
> points which may might clear why I think so, totally unorganized in 
> note form.

<snip reasoning for dropping gui>

OK, some of your points are worth a second thought while others are 
IMHO not - as you have stated before, if somebody wants to work on gui 
he will do it. And I certainly don't think this discussion is about 
"whether we should drop gui or not". Moreover you are always free to 
start a new project based on -base, and you don't even have to kill 
-gui beforehand :-)

> - I know quite a lot of former NeXT users. Some of them moved to 
> Windows, some to Linux and most to MacOSX. Know what ? Nobody is 
> really interested in a NeXTstep looking GUI anymore ! Certainly, any 
> NeXT user will look at GNUstep and say "wow, cool", but nobody will 
> actually want to use it, because UI technology has evolved. MacOSX UI 
> is considered better than NeXTstep and XP UI is considered better than 
> NeXTstep (talk with someone who uses VisualStudio.NET !).

I am a former NeXT user (I still have 3 black boxes running at home:) 
and guess what, I still *am* interested in NEXTSTEP's look and feel, or 
more precisely I am mainly interested in that :-) This is one of the 
major reasons for me to use GNUstep. What I would like to become 
reality one days is a system as elegant as NEXTSTEP was but based on 
GNUstep and a modern foundation. I am less interested in a cross 
platform API (there are enough APIs around which are stable, widely 
adopted and so on) and I am not interested in using KDE or GNOME or 
Windows as my primary desktop platform, what I really would like to see 
is nothing more than a resurrection of NEXTSTEP based on GNUstep. Maybe 
it is just a dream, but even after such a long time I keep dreaming it 
...:-)

BTW call me a die hard NEXTSTEP fan, but IMHO neither Aqua's nor Luna's 
UI *feel* come close to what NEXTSTEP provided. Maybe they look more 
modern, maybe they use more colours and nicer looking icons, but this 
is just sugar!

> - GNUstep-GUI might get significant attention if the goal would be to 
> reproduce MacOSX completly. Pretty much comparable to WINE at a higher 
> level. But this is even a bigger project impossible using existing 
> resources.

I agree. And this would also be dangerous - we all know how Apple 
reacts on "cloners" ...:-)

> If I think another day about the topic, I would probably come up with 
> more reasons. I know that those a pretty aggressive points, but IMHO 
> gnustep-gui can only lead into nothing. It might be a fun project, but 
> anyone who actually wants to accomplish something useable for more 
> people should think about the points above.

I just disagree with that :-) But on the same time I agree that there 
is an inherent problem with GNUstep and its development cycles. Why 
does it make such a slow progress, why are there not more programmers 
interested in contributing? I am afraid one main reason (for the 
latter) is the language, would we use C++ or Java I bet we would see 
much wider interest. But unfortunately this is not in our hands, we can 
only hope that Apple's marketing will help us here!

> So what would I suggest as a GNUstep goal ?
> I have no ready made answer on that, again only some thoughts ;-)
>
> First I think we should focus on GNUstep's real advantages. I see two 
> things which are worth a project:
> a) Objective-C (and Foundation)
> b) gstep-web
>
> I have some difficulties explaining that in email, but I give it a try 
> ;-)
>
> a) IMHO the real advantage is Objective-C. It's simply the better Java 
> and the better C#. IMHO the biggest advantage of ObjC is it's 100% 
> integration with C (to the level of toll free bridging as seen in 
> CoreFoundation).

It is better indeed, but who knows it, who uses it aside from some 
Apple developers? So while it is better in technical terms it imposes 
(big) problems to the project because it is so little known and used - 
but again, maybe Apple can change this (in the long term!)...

<snip>
> Objective-C is the better C and instead of writing everything from 
> scratch we should use that advantage and become a "value-adding" 
> product for existing stuff. Pretty much like scripting languages, only 
> on a different level.
> It's certainly a project that looks very doable to write a very good 
> and complete Objective-C wrapper for Gnome or KDE in, say 3 months 
> using 5 people.

While this could definitely be an interesting project I doubt it has 
anything to do w/ GNUstep :-)

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip