Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, January 7, 2001, at 06:29 PM, Helge Hess wrote:

> I already mentioned this. Personally I think OPENSTEP compatibility is 
> unimportant now that MacOSX isn't OPENSTEP anymore, it was very 
> interesting when there was the NeXT product. Right now MacOSX 
> compatibility would be interesting, but would result in a major rewrite. 

Not sure about this - if you just mean cocoa compatibility, GNUstep is
pretty much there.  If you mean core foundation, I agree it's a pretty big
job.  I think that cocoa compatibility is probably enough though.

> Nobody is tied to gtk. You can also use wxWindows or Qt ;-) I would 
> suggest moving the focus of GNUstep away from being a GUI toolkit more 
> to stuff which is already good, base and GDL and improving gstep-web - 
> maybe to focus on implementing a backend of my so called widget-servers 
> (XUL itself doesn't care whether the widget-set is Windows, gtk+ or Qt 
> ..) 

I kind of agree here - I think emphasising th non-gui stuff could win us
developers ... but I'm not willing to give up the dream of a really good
look and *feel* for a gui environment.

> This IMHO depends on the personal reason why you work on gstep-gui. Yes, 
> it is fun to develop a GUI framework - but this doesn't imply it makes a 
> lot of sense ;-) 

I hope the gui stuff will be real good in the long run.  My company doesn't
need/use it, but I find even the rather messed up version that is MacOS-X
a better world to work in than any other I've seen.  I firmly believe that
at some point things will begin to come together.  If some other free
software development gets there first, fine - but at the moment they don't
seem to be aiming at the same target.