Re: Some thoughts about GS

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

ian.mondragon@bankofamerica.com wrote (Wed, 3 Jan 2001 07:44:15 -0600 ):
> i am bound by my objective-c/GNUstep fanaticism to respond...so here's my 2
> cents:

;-)
 
> 1) i think that even considering integrating GNUstep with anything GNOME is
> a hideous idea.  bordering on holy war-esque treason, and grounds to be
> stoned over.  <grin>  seriously, though - not only do i, personally, despise
> nearly everything about GNOME, (from it's childish, "i can do it better than
> you can" beginnings, to it's [don't deny it] windows clone nature) but any
> merger of the two instigated by the GNUstep community in many ways
> completely nullifies the intent of GNUstep's existance.  let the GNOME
> trolls figure out for themselves, after countless GTK+ version conflicts and
> mounting code bloat, what is superior.  or just let them perish in the fire
> and brimstone of thier evil UI on upcoming versions of slowaris. <hahaha>

Uh, I never wanted GNUstep 'to turn into' GNOME, but to make use of some shared 
foundations. But as it seems more than the majority (...) doesn't want to see 
this happen, so I just forget about it again...;-)
 
> 2) apps.  not only do we need a few must-have applications that people will
> greedily devour and drool for more, but we need applications that are simply
> beyond the scope of traditional tools available elsewhere.  what these are
> and how to go about creating them is the tricky part.  

Well, speaking for myself, what I need are tools which let me do basic tasks, 
that is tools which handle common problems/tasks:

- mail reading/sending
- file inspection/handling (some basic sys admin stuff maybe, such as user 
management etc)
- a good, handy text editor
- multimedia stuff
- net browsing
- usenet reader
- dev tools
- and a good terminal!!!

This is nothing 'beyond the scope of traditional tools'! If we are going to 
target the one and only IDE, the one and only mail reader and so on, we will 
never reach these goals (again...)!

> on the dev-apps side we have the infamous ProjectCenter & Gorm.  we NEED
> these.  badly.  we need to all put our noses to the grindstone to help out
> with these where we can - with ProjectCenter, we need to give feedback to
> phillipe, cheer him on for the phenominal work that he has done thus far,
> and come running with the water bottles when he gets thirsty mid stride. ;-)

Well, thanks, I really would appreciate some feedback - although this spare 
time project of mine is certainly not 'phenominal'...;-)
Also, I cannot do the whole project alone. If somebody would volunteer, I'd be 
very happy! I also will start a new job in 3 few months, thus I do not know how 
much spare time will remain to work on GNUstep.

> for gorm we need to do all of that and then some - we need palettes for all
> the things our peevish little minds can come up with.  then we need to use
> them.

Agreed! 

...and to make all that really happen, we need a stable AppKit, that is a 
really brilliant xgps backend!!! Thus xgps needs to become more stable and 
*fast*! Compared to DPS on my old NS3.3 cube (25MHz m68k ....), xgps 'feels' so 
much slower on my 450MHz PIII...
 
And one other thing: the competition for 'killer dev apps' is getting tougher 
and tougher, soon there will be Kylix, the KDE team is working on sth like VB 
(*shudder*....), KDevelop and friends is really nice for VC++ guys and so on... 
We need to have all this *before* the next decade... thus again, we need more 
developers actively working on GNUstep.... I repeat myself: how are we going to 
attract new developers? This will be the essential part IMHO!

> there is also the possibility that someone out there wants to build a
> DECENT, STABLE browser for *nix os's (good lord do i detest the selection we
> currently have).  anyone ever use BeOS?  anyone love the simplicity & speed
> of NetPositive as much as i do?  THAT would truly be a thing of beauty.
> gargantuan project involving a rediculous amount of blood, sweat & tears,
> but a thing of beauty nonetheless...

Well, do you know Galeon? Based on Gecko, this is/will become a really cool 
GNOME browser I think.... sth similar for GNUstep would be terrific (or a port 
of OmniWeb to GNUstep, I will contact the Omni guys in the next few days.).

cheers, Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert | http://www.nice.ch/~phip/