GNUstep and Etoile

[Fred Kiefer]

I don' want to make too much fuzz about Etoile people not posting their
new release on the GNUstep mailing lists. Nor about not waiting for the
next GNUstep gui and base release, which is due in a few days and could
even have been brought forward a bit, if requested by Etoile.

What is worrying me more than this accidental things is the feeling of a
growing split between our two projects. To start of with a personal
opinion, I think that Etoile is by far the more interesting project. In
GNUstep we only try to reimplement concepts defined by Next and Apple
whereas Etoile seeks to come up with concepts for the future. So I
really understand why you are working on Etoile and not GNUstep,
although I choose differently.

Now what are the signs I see for a split?

- Etoile people stopped to contribute to GNUstep (code and bug reports).
This may be due to GNUstep offering everything they need or because they
prefer to fix problems in their own code and keep the changes there.

- Etoile not adopting to changes in GNUstep. Here I may be looking on
the wrong source code, but at least in Etoile trunk Camaelon and Wild
Menus ignore many of the changes made to GNUstep drawing code over the
last two years. There may be other areas where the code from the two
projects would need some more integration, but I am most ignorant of
that. (another bad sign)

I think this drifting apart is bad for both projects. It has drained
GNUstep from some of its most active developers and contributes to the
stand still of GNUstep's theming interface. And for Etoile it leads to
problems when users try to install Etoile on a different version of
GNUstep than the one the code was tested with. It also results in users
not getting bug fixes from GNUstep because of Etoile methods overriding
that code not being adjusted.

What about a shared review of code and concepts in Etoile that proved to
be valuable and of interest in GNUstep and then an effort to incorporate
the relevant parts of that back into GNUstep? Setting up once more a
clean interface between our projects.

I hope to start a productive discussion with that mail and not some
flame war.
Fred