Re: GNUstep moving forward

[Riccardo]

Hello,

On Saturday, October 22, 2005, at 12:46 PM, Gregory John Casamento wrote:

> GNUstep has been relatively stagnant over the last several months and 
> it has
> become a cause for concern for me.
for me too, it has become sometimes a cause of frustration. Since I have 
put it as only graphical environment on my NetBSD/ppc computer and as 
the default one on my laptop for months now, I feel all the problems, 
missing things even more.

> 1) More apps.  Many of the following points will help with this, but 
> this is
> very important.
I think this is of uttermost importance. We had many talks of dedicated 
distributions, special desktop environments, but everybody seems to 
forget applications. ALso many persons, including developers, might be 
more attracted by having a more complete environment where for example 
choices exists. Some people like to have the ability to choose between 
different programs that do task X. And, remember, for some tasks we 
don't even have a single choice.

> 2) Better theme support.  Integration of Camaelon into the core gui 
> library if
> possible
I agree that we need better theme support, especially when thinking 
about "impure" platforms like running gnustep applications inside 
windows, motif or gnome environments.
I would strongly dislike a direct integration of camaleon or equivalents 
in gnustep itself directly, but I'd like it to be a no-brainer 
installation.  That is something that can be built and installed without 
efforts (thinking for example that in a linux distribution it may be a 
"theme support package" that can be installed and removed with no harm)

> 3) Better win32 support.  Many companies are really eager to port their 
> legacy
> NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP or Cocoa apps to GNUstep under Windows.   The 
> prospect of
> Linux and BSD support appeals to them as well, but not as much as 
> Windows.   I
> currently have two companies with whom I am talking about this.
I too had people almost catching interest in gnustep but when they heard 
about essentially non-existent windows support... interest waned. Some 
people wouldn't even care for linux or solaris, but just about windows 
and mac for their applications. We might not like this, but it is the 
truth out there.

> 4) Better distro support.  We really need to get GNUstep into as many
> distributions as possile, this will ramp up exposure of GNUstep to more 
> people
> and help us get more developers and users.
I agree here. Currently I know we are in Debian and Gentoo and NetBSD. I 
don't know the state of the latter, but the first two are in terrible  
shape. For example my own PRICE is on both many minor and major releases 
old... Why? serious problems compiling new versions? Or lack of care? It 
is bad publicity essentially. And yes we all know that guys at Debian 
have serious brain problems... but well...
What about Redhat, suse, yellowdog and madriva? I know they are very 
very popular. RPM. based.
And OpenBSD and FreeBSD? How is the status there? Also having packages 
for sunfreeware for solaris 2.5 and up might be quite cool too. The site 
recently started accepting user contributions.

Getting into a distribution gets us exposure, but it is also a 
double-bladed axe: we get to the public, but if we give out a bad 
impressions.. well you know how people react if too many things are 
missing, broken... people installing from distributions won't question 
the quality of the framework, but just the sheer amount of applications 
available and their look and workings.

Thus... staying in a distribution but remaining there unupdated is 
dangerous. Also most of the usable applications should be immediately 
available.

> We as a project need to be more adaptive and less resistant to change.  
> More
> than anything right now we need to consider the audience we are playing 
> to.
> GNUstep needs to be better able to integrate with other environments.
even more than that the gnustep community should be able to collaborate.
As I noted above, many persons work on their own pet-projects (as is 
often natural in volunteer efforts) but the common parts of projects may 
be overseen thus duplicating the effort and spreading our already thin 
coding efforts.

So although I think it is important that we integrate with other 
environments (windows, gnome and kde come to my mind), I wouldn't put 
this item very high in our priority list, at least not now. But I 
wouldn't cancel it either: I mean that if an incompatibility  can be 
easily avoided or integration can be done without a bigger cost of 
complexity or bloat in gnustep it should be done.


Cheers,
   R