Re: ObjC documentation

[Christopher Culver]

Ritesh Kumar <ritesh.removethis@cs.unc.edu> wrote:
> So perhaps one of the easiest ways to go for it
> would be to make a "theme adaptor" in GNUStep (I don't know how far that
> is possible) for GTK and QT themes.

This isn't a very popular idea among most of the developers, and I happen to 
agree with that faction. I do wish that the toolbar colour would be changed to 
the slightly more attractive colours used in the "OpenStep" WindowMaker theme, 
but that's all.

> If some user does want to have a different UI why not give it to them?

Because a) consistency is good (how many people are clamoring for skinnable 
Mac OS X?), and b) there is limited manpower to implement such a feature.

> The only reason why I say so is so that
> GNUStep gets wider recognition.

I'm not sure GNUstep needs wider recognition among the people of which you 
speak, i.e. people who want to make their windows and menus look pretty. For 
those kinds of users, there is already GNOME or KDE. I would love to see 
GNUstep get more attention, but it's got the possibility to be a great desktop 
for hardcore *nix users and people who can't get over their despair that 
NeXTSTEP is gone. Such a community would be more impressed by ease of 
development, consistent UI, and apps that don't treat them like idiots (like 
GNOME does nowadays) than themes.

> Even after a lot of search I was not able
> to find even one working Linux+GNUStep distribution.

There's no need for a distribution with exclusively GNUstep, as the user can 
install it himself. SimplyGNUstep et al. are nice ideas, but they are several 
years too early.

> I am
> currently using GNUStep on my Gentoo but even there I have still not been
> able to install GWorkspace.

Gentoo's GNUstep support is often broken. Last time I looked into emerging the 
GNUstep core libs, there were mismatched versions. I'd recommend just 
installing the packages manually and then using "emerge -i". Most heavy 
GNUstep users upgrade nearly daily from CVS.

> In fact I am probably only using WindowMaker.

If you are using WindowMaker, you are really not using GNUstep at all. WMaker 
has little relation to GNUstep, in spite of the several mentions of the 
GNUstep project in the WMaker documentation. The "official GNUstep window 
manager" is InterfaceWM, although it is still incomplete.

> The moment GNUStep has a userbase, it would encourage people to publicize
> whatever they feel about Obj-C which I think is very crucial.

Apple already does that work for us, all we need to do is hold onto their 
coattails.

Christopher Culver

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