Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Saturday, April 5, 2003, at 11:57 PM, Helge Hess wrote:
> Philippe C.D.Robert wrote:
> > it's funny and sad at the same time that we have such discussions 
> > every now and then...
> Yes. Notably GNUstep didn't move any further in public recognition so 
> far. We still have the state that gstep-base is stable, other things 
> not.

Well, you cannot deny that there has been made much progress wrt the 
AppKit part of GNUstep in the last 1, 2 years. But the public 
recognition is very low, probably also just because nobody waits for 
GNUstep, the existing alternatives are there and indeed good - so yes, 
we have to be really better in order to become successful.

> > 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.
>
> CF adds compatibility to MacOSX. Several things (eg XML and full HTTP) 
> are only available in CF but not in Cocoa but used in Cocoa 
> applications (because it's useful base functionality).

It does, but this is not related to Cocoa, so if we target Cocoa why 
should we adopt CF? I don't think we want/can/should 'copy' Mac OS X. 
Unless of course it can easily be done or/and somebody is interested in 
spending time for writing such an interface...:-)

> > 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 :-)
>
> Sure. My points are only true if the goal is a project which tries for 
> completion. If it's pure hacking-for-fun without a required goal and 
> for the developers personal use only, there is no need to discuss.

GNUstep tries for completion, otherwise we can stop working on it right 
now. One step at the time, even if it takes a while... :-)

> > 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 :-)
>
> OK. +2 for NeXTstep, +1.000.000 for MacOSX ;-) Again, no doubt that 
> there are people which still like the NeXTstep UI better (Richard said 
> so too), but *IMHO* the vast majority of users do not care and prefer 
> the other.

Again, this is more a question about the feel than the look. While I 
prefer NEXTSTEP over Mac OS X in this respect, I don't dislike the 
latter, but if I can choose ... :-) Anyway, I guess one argument here 
is also that almost nobody knows NEXTSTEP and its user experience. I 
bet that if more would do so we would see more contributors. Hey, not 
even all of the current GNUstep contributors do know NEXTSTEP as it 
seems!

> > 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!
>
> We are discussing that for years without effect. Apple is advertising 
> Cocoa for years now with little effect for GNUstep. Why ? Because it's 
> not interesting because it does nothing a Cocoa developer cares about.

To be honest, Apple does not really advertise Objective-C and it just 
starts shifting from pushing Carbon to pushing Cocoa. I am really 
curious what the next WWDC brings in this context. But lets be 
realistic, there will probably never be the day where hordes of 
Objective-C programmers will "flood the market", even if all developers 
on Mac OS X will use this language it will remain a niche.

> > > 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!)...
> You can convince/show people by providing *solutions* (usually 
> applications). Zope is the Python solution which made it widely know, 
> before it was just yet-another-scripting language.

I agree, moreover I believe this is the only way to convince people! It 
is the solution which matters, not the technology. Now having a good 
technology means that it is far more easy to write good solutions - 
this is why there are still people out there which believe in GNUstep 
and Objective-C, this is why Apple puts more and more focus on 
Objective-C and Cocoa and this is why MS came up with something like C# 
or SUN with Java. Unfortunately it is not enough to have a good 
technology, you also need people using it, otherwise you will just "die 
in beauty"... You need to convince existing developers to switch and 
you need to teach new developers to use it from the start. This is what 
Apple can do for us, nothing more and nothing less.

> > > 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 :-)
> What is GNUstep ? ;-) An incomplete GUI library which is never going 
> to be completed ? (yes, aggressive, but see my points about resources 
> which do not go away by not talking about it ;-)

Discussion is needed, but talking alone does not solve the problem 
...:-)

BTW I believe -gui is in a state where it can be used quite well. What 
we lack is the applications which proof it, the solutions which 
convince the people (more developers first) that there is something out 
there which is worth spending time with. No desktop project started 
with a perfect library which could be used to write perfect apps, but 
all successful desktop projects managed to attract developers to write 
or porting apps.

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