Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Nicola Pero]

> The gnustep gui library is simply not perfectly usable. 
> If you don't believe me, try to write a good text editor...  

Why don't you try to write a good text editor in gtk ?

Around one year ago, gnome invested approximately six months of full time
work of some of their best hackers to write a working gtk widget to edit
html.

This was long *after* official releases of gnome marked as stable and
complete and shipped everywhere.

So, I don't think it is a good example of what can be considered essential
for a gui library to be of use.

I'll make you another example.  A gnustep freeciv client.  Nothing
prevents you from writing a succesful and complete gnustep freeciv client.  
It's a huge task which will take you a month of full time work so I don't
suggest you do it, but you can.

<the only real problem I am aware of is that libobjc exposes a C function
called `hash_new ()', and the freeciv library also defines a C function
called `hash_new ()'.  IMHO the libobjc function should be (at least)
renamed to `objc_hash_new ()' to avoid these kinds of conflicts.>

But in my opinion, if you can write a gnustep freeciv client, this means
the library is usable.

> Besides, the integration with X is also just not as good as it should be
> - I know you know the nasty focus problem for example.

'just not as good as it should be' does not mean 'unusable' in my opinion.

I'm insisting on this point because if people go on saying on mailing
lists that the gui library is not usable just because it is 'not as good
as it should be', this is purely marketing against us, and nobody will use
it.

And if nobody uses it, it will improve very slowly, which makes precisely
for the bad cycle we are trying to break !

Why don't you just say - it's usable, but not yet as good as it should be,
the rich text editor is not brilliant, a bit slow and buggy, and the X
interaction should be improved.  Because hey - don't forget that menus
work, popup buttons work, buttons work, scrollviews work, sliders work,
splitviews work, boxes work, browsers work, tableviews work, textfields
work, forms work, radio buttons work, matrices work, save panels work,
open panels work, images work, colors work, fonts work, etc...  This is a
huge amount of stuff which just works now and which in my opinion is
enough to give you a library which can be of a lot of use.