Re: GNUstep and Etoile

[Nicolas Roard]

Hi fred,

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 9:29 AM, Fred Kiefer <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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.

That's very true. We were delayed by the LLVM release, so what happened
is simply that as soon as LLVM made their release we made ours. We
should have synchronised with gnustep if the next release was so close.

> 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.

The former is more likely :)

> - 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)

This I believe falls in my garden. Both Camaelon and Wild Menu need
to be updated, and I simply haven't had the time to contribute to either etoile
or gnustep this past year. Now that I'm free again, I'll resume this work.
Others contributors to etoile simply worked on their own parts of the project..

> 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.

do we have other examples apart from camaelon of things that do that ?..

> 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.

That'd be great -- what parts are you thinking of ? (yep, camaelon I'd guess)

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

No problems.

thanks,

-- 
Nicolas Roard