Re: GNUstep ROADMAP

[Adrian Robert]

On Nov 26, 2005, at 10:21 AM, Gregory John Casamento wrote:

> Richard,
>
> See below...
>
> --- Richard Frith-Macdonald <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > On 26 Nov 2005, at 06:05, Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> >
> > > Here is the Roadmap:
> > >
> > > http://mediawiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Roadmap
> > >
> > > If you are a maintainer, please make any changes for your section
> > > that you deem
> > > appropriate.
> >
> > ...
> > 2. gui seems wildly ambitious (complete coding on all existing
> > classes) .
>
> By this I simply mean that we should try to bring all of the  
> classes currently
> in GNUstep GUI up to spec.   Many of them are already there.   I am  
> *not*
> saying that we should implement all of the Cocoa classes, but only  
> that we
> should finish the classes which have already been started in the  
> repository.

Agreed.


> ...
> > GNUstep  1.1
> >
> > Integrate camaelon into gui ... I think this should be in 1.0 as a
> > matter of practicality ... as far as I can see, this is an easily
> > achievable target, so why not do it soon.

I really think this needs to go into 1.0.  Judging by the amount of  
discussion themes ALWAYS get whenever there is ANY external publicity  
about GNUstep, I think initial reception will be far better if we can  
just say, "download and switch on this theme" instead of "someday  
we'll have Camealon in GNUstep".  Let's not be impatient for the 1.0  
release and then have lots of people dismissing it with "great, but  
too 80's for me"..


> > Integration of WildMenus ... I haven't looked at this, so i don't
> > know, but seems reasonable.

This on the other hand, we rarely hear about on the lists, so I think  
it's a much lower priority than Camaelon.


Something that's not mentioned in the list but I think is important  
for smoothing the entry of new users is a Preferences app.  There are  
all of these half-started preferences projects, it shouldn't take  
long for a motivated person to gather these pieces and produce  
something that puts up a graphical front for most of the gui/back  
defaults and perhaps assists with Camaelon theme setting.  GNUstep is  
supposed to be easy to develop with, and we have GORM, so this  
shouldn't be rocket science.

Finally, TextEdit and Terminal out of backbone should be made part of  
the release.  I'm not saying backbone shouldn't remain a separate  
project.  But, just like GNOME ships a bunch of basic apps in its  
distribution, I think these utilities should be part of a "base  
gnustep install".  Both are probably sufficiently stable now,  
although supporting background color changing in Terminal and fixing  
some miscellaneous unimplemented areas in TextEdit would probably go  
far towards improving the perceived polish.

It would be nice to include the PDF and image viewers as well, but  
these are further from 1.0 state.  What about GNUMail?


> What about documentation requirement ?
> I think it a must to attracked developpers.

I agree here -- the documentation should at least not have large  
blank and "description forthcoming" areas.  I'll try to find some  
time to help work on this.