Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Helge Hess]

Philippe C.D.Robert wrote:
> Well, you cannot deny that there has been made much progress wrt the 
> AppKit part of GNUstep in the last 1, 2 years.

It has made a lot of progress regarding completeness of just the 
implementation of just the GUI library. There is still little testing by 
application level developers and even less testing by application users.
The initial implementation time of some piece of software is only a very 
small fraction of the time required to build a working system.

> > 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...:-)

By targetting Cocoa I see "targetting Cocoa developers". And Cocoa 
developers often need to use (and will use) CF on MacOSX. Eg Nicola used 
CFXML on MacOSX for doing XML parsing.
If you want to make it easy to port Cocoa applications, a CF 
implementation is helping a lot.

But: I do not think, that this is the most important thing. It's "just" 
significant.

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

But it misses a project plan on
a) what exactly to accomplish
b) in what timeframe
c) how and with which resources
Right now GNUstep is going on for about 10? years and the "only" stable 
output is a Foundation library and a Makefile package.

> I agree, moreover I believe this is the only way to convince people! It 
> is the solution which matters, not the technology.

So shouldn't the GNUstep mission statement focus on solutions instead of 
the technologies to accomplish them ? And line out what exactly are the 
solutions' advantages against the existing solutions ?

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

Neither is just hacking into the dark ;-)

IMHO GNUstep really needs some plan on what to do in what timeframe. If 
we still talk about OpenStep compatibility in 2010, it's really to late 
(IMHO it's already to late because other environments are well 
established and are getting better any year).

Regards,
  Helge