why do we need change?

[Riccardo]

Hello,

I will put my thoughts down very bluntly thus try to get the meaning and 
don't stop too much on the form.

My question is essentially... "why do we need a change in gnustep"? The 
pope recently said "continuous change is evil". ANd I agree, it is one 
of the things that in computing is disturbing me most. You need to 
accomplish task X and are using tool Y. Tool Y requires library A and B. 
Now you have a bug in Y. Suddenly you realize that there is no bug fix, 
but you need to upgrade Y to Y2... but Y2 does require version A2 
which.. stupidly requires a tool Z2 to just get (any hint to svn is 
purely coincidental) it and it might even happen you might need a new 
compiler to build the whole thing. And you end up discovering that 
things changed too much, you need to relearn everything, your 
preferences are lost and at the end you are just frustrated.

I am not advocating to stop every change, but just to ponder changes and 
additions carefully, the more they are low level and at the end gnustep 
core itself is the foundation of everything.

This to write that personally I don't feel all that urgent change in 
-core of gnustep! People seem to hint we need a revolution and powerful 
tools to do it, but I think -core is already in a powerful shape that 
could lead to the writing to a whole OS with applications (aren't we 
almost openstep?).

What I think we need most now is an evolutionary approach in fixing and 
stabilizing the core itself and providing the best tools for development 
and a desktop environment. This is a way to get exposure, to stabilize 
things and getting a "good" release on which to build upon later without 
spreading our resources too thin. Also, the only way of finding weak 
spots in a library is to actually use it to build a lot of serious stuff 
and not just dreaming of integrating the latest and coolest technology 
we have heard of.

Once we have done our "gnome 1 with gtk1" step using current tools we 
might think what to do next. I personally would think weary about a step 
like doing gtk2/gnome2 at the beginning, but it is too easy to speak 
now. Since we have a cousin which gets developed and is called macosx it 
can be wise to keep an eye on it too.. but the current approach which is 
"try to do a bit of everything" is not proving out well with our current 
limited set of resources. Of course, this too, may change.

So it might be interesting not only to think about a "gnustep roadmap" 
but a "gnustep environment roadmap" trying to think in a broader view.

Cheers,
   Riccardo