Re: The need for an official GNUstep desktop

[Nicolas Roard]

On 8/27/06, Sašo Kiselkov <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'd much rather prefer GNUstep to stay a cross-platform API and
> development environment, rather than trying to be a bit of everything.
> It would hurt commercial applicability of GNUstep, such as we do at our
> company, if I had to deploy tons of other software together with my
> GNUstep app. Some for of coordination between a full-blown desktop and
> the GNUstep development framework would be nice, of course, but it
> should not directly affect GNUstep development. I'd rather see the
> relationship between GNUstep and it's "official" desktop be something
> like GTK+ or Qt are to all DEs built on it - they are foundations of
> them, but is also usable to build stand-alone apps.

I agree. Other reasons are that you'd need to reach an agreement about
what exactly this yet-another-gnustep-desktop project would be, which
in my experience is not that simple ^_^ , particularly if it's
supposed to be the "official one", and also that considering that not
many persons are working on the existing gnustep desktop projects _at
the moment_ (I mean, not many persons are working on gnustep itself
!), I don't really know how much persons will work in the end on this
hypothetical new desktop.

In fact... I'm starting more and more to think that GNUstep, instead
of trying to be a jack of all trades -- I mean, it's a programming
toolkit, no, a development environment with RAD, no, a web application
server, no, a desktop with a filemanager... etc. -- should "split"
into its sub projects ("technically" not, perhaps, but "publically"
yes).

Letting each sub-project stands on its own would enormously improve
the outside readability of the whole, and, I think, help attracting
new people more easily. It's perhaps a simple as (yet again) working
on the website to put everything into a "GNUstep" umbrella, but having
different, clearly separated sections...

Beside, coming back on the desktop idea, what exactly is wrong with,
ah, say, étoilé ;-) ? (it's not like we are not happily welcoming new
members or not doing any progresses)

--
Nicolas Roard
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly
by." -- Douglas Adams