Re: Windows and GNUstep

[Philip Mötteli]

Hi


Am 07.07.2005 um 00:13 schrieb Wolfgang Sourdeau:

> La plume légère, vers Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 03:13:58PM -0400, heure  
> d'inspiration,
> Adam Fedor écrivait en ces mots:
>
>
> > What can we do to make this happen? Could we buy someone a  
> > dedicated Windows computer if they promised to work on the Windows  
> > port? Perhaps pay a Windows programmer to help us?
>
> IMO, getting GNUstep to work correctly on Windows is something  
> important
> too. But it is probably not as important to fix now than to fix other
> incompatibilities with Mac OSX. People who will use the Windows  
> port are
> likely to be interested in it because of GNUstep's compatibility with
> the OSX api (otherwise they'd probably just use GNUstep for GNU/ 
> Linux).
> And although we're (slowly) getting there, I think there are too many
> important little things to fix beforehand. And for that matter,  
> sticking
> on one platform brings more benefits:
> 1) it avoids the disappointing that people could feel when trying
>    something that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't;
> 2) it let us focus on the inner problems rather than both the inner
>    problems and the cross-platform issues.
>
> Besides, having enough stability in GNUstep will likely attract more
> developers.

That's exactly the reason, why I do not agree with this opinion.  
Having a Windows port, which allows most developers to port their  
software to Windows, by just investing no more than 3% of their  
software's cost, would attract so many developers, that this would  
bring on GNUstep much quicker, than a perfect version of OpenStep  
running only on Linux.
I mean, after all, we had that situation for years now: GNUstep works  
well on Linux, but has not been interesting for most of the  
developers. The big potential of OpenStep developers are Mac  
developers and Mac developers don't targetLinux, they target Windows.  
If we want those developers to help GNUstep, we have to change their  
perception of GNUstep's Windows port.
By just concentrating our few tiny little forces to make just one  
Linux port, but perfectly and complete, we will never arrive there,  
because of too little manpower.
In my eyes, the manpower lies in GNUstep's Windows port. And the  
manpower is, in my eyes, GNUstep's only problem.


Re
Phil