Re: Hi, I'm back

[David Lázaro Saz]

On 18/05/2005, at 22:50, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> Nice to have you back, you seem to have left about a month before I  
> started with active GNUstep development. That way, we never met  
> before. The interesting bit is that I was also involved with  
> GNUstep development on Windows. I gave up on this in the mean time  
> (I just don't use Windows often enought now), but am still  
> interested in what goes on there.

Pleased to meet you then.  And nice work with the back-end, when I  
left it simply didn't work at all.  Now it even can be downloaded  
with an installer.  That's a great advance for sure.

> Why not start off with a public discusion on this mailing list and  
> move to private conversations when stuff gets to boring for most  
> readers?

Yes, of course.  I'll get my ideas and observations in order and  
begin a thread tomorrow.

> What is it you want to change?

Well, I have no way to know what is that I want to change yet.  First  
I'll need to get used to the current code base.  So I'm not proposing  
nothing radical here, rest assured.  And it could be long too.

What I do know is what are my necessities in order for GNUstep to be  
a viable commercial solution for developing and deploying apps for  
Windows.  Specifically my personal apps and the ones I develop at  
work.  I also don't suffer from commercial pressures.  This is due to  
our current apps state: they are all working nicely on top of  
OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows and Mac OS X as of now.

Concerning the changes to drawing, I noticed them some time ago  but  
I still have to do a full read of some parts to see if that will  
work.  Let's say that my first impression is that it could be exactly  
what is needed.  Heck, even Windows does something similar internally  
to draw the luna interface.

To sum it up, this is about taking the current Windows support of  
GNUstep and making it also a real alternative to other development  
environments for that platform.  But I don't want to deconstruct  
anything.  If I learnt something during this past years is that most  
of the times a rewrite is not the best solution to a problem.  That's  
not saying that some experiments won't be needed but first I'll need  
to wet my feet before I can make such conclusions.

Expect a message or two from me tomorrow to see how could this goals  
be retrofitted in the project, and how could I contribute to other  
areas while I am advancing this.

Cheers,

David.

P.S.: Is it me or is this mailing list working _slowly_?