Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, January 7, 2001, at 11:19 AM, Philippe C.D.Robert wrote:

> Hi, 
>  
> Helge Hess <helge.hess@skyrix.com> wrote (Sun, 07 Jan 2001 03:39:13 +0100): 
> > IMHO the discussion brought up some interesting points. Eg the 
> > discussion "use WM or write an ObjC window manager" is 100% the same to 
> > me like the discussion "use Qt/gtk+ or write gstep-gui". There already 
> > are stable implementations which have success and I wonder were there is 
> > the sense to make another one. It doesn't even provide MacOSX 
> > compatibility anymore (given that it enjoyed some major rewrites, eg 
> > Quartz) and therefore is completly on it's own. 
>  
> Well, that was exactly my idea when I started this thread...;-) Since nobody 
> seemed to like 
> the idea to share foundations with other projects due to the superiority of 
> GS, i.e. gtk+, I 
> thought it would be logic that the window manager - an important part in the 
> X world - should 
> be based on that 'superior' tecyhnology as well, or at least make use of it - 
> even if this 
> takes some more time to get to the point... 

I don't think there is any problem with the notion of sharing with other 
projects in 
principle, it's just not technically realistic due to basic architectural 
differences...
With many toolkits there is just no reasonable way to share - we would just 
have to adopt
the other toolkit and discard our existing work.  The problem with doing that 
is that,
our existing toolkits are overall as good as, or better than the toolkits we 
might
look at adopting, so while we would gain on some features, we'd lose out 
overall.

I looked at the gnome stuff, from a viewpoint of trying to integrate with 
gstep-base
and it simply had nothing to offer.  However, special purpose libraries (like 
libxml)
can reasonably be integrated, and I'm in favour of doing that where it's 
feasable.

> > IMHO the race there is already running and GNUstep-gui didn't even made 
> > it to the start. Further I think that the 'technological advantage' 
> > which GNUstep might have had three years ago is basically void now. In 
> > 1996 a NeXTstep+IB was incredible, today a PyQt, PyWxWindows or even 
> > Mozilla-XUL are (IMHO of course) much more powerful and flexible. 
>  
> I agree with you that the advantage has gone (well, it was never there due to 
> the lack of PB and 
> IB), but I do not agree with you that it's XUL or DHTML which is the 
> 'future'...;-) 
>  

I'm not sure what the future is either - but I'm sure that the OpenStep GUI 
design is
basically a damn good architecture - so I don't think that the technological 
advantage
is completely gone, though it's much diminished.

Our problem is lack of developers, not poorly designed libraries.