Re: [Suggestion] GNUstep-test for quality control

[Philippe C.D. Robert]

Hi,

Dennis Leeuw wrote:
> Hi Stefan,
>
> An important note: the Users of GNUstep are developers. GNUstep is a 
> development environment. That's the problem.

IMHO the real problem is that GNUstep is only promoted as development 
environment. I never understood the reasoning behind this strategy, but 
so it is. Personally I doubt that there are many developers out there 
who are interested in writing code for an API which is not part of an 
entire desktop solution and/or does not fit nicely into existing 
environments (in these days).

Let me give an example, many ex OpenStep developers and maybe even Cocoa 
developers were(are?) interested in porting their stuff to GNUstep 
(mostly running under X11) assuming it would be some sort of an OPENSTEP 
 or Mac OS X replacement. Something which makes them independent from 
NeXT or Apple, something which gives them a real alternative. But what 
they actually find is a set of libraries which allows them to port their 
apps, but which does not (and IMHO cannot really) integrate into the 
environment of choice (GNOME, KDE, CDE ... ) - be it because of 
different philosophies (GUI) or implementation "details" (eg. copy and 
paste and so on). As a result only a few really spend time working with 
GNUstep because GNUstep as such is not the alternative most of them are 
looking for. At least this is my experience...

To make it short I believe that GNUstep would be far more successful if 
it was "only" a X11 based desktop solution than a crossplattform API 
which has to integrate into other desktops. But this discussion is an 
old one and off topic anyway, I guess. So excuse me for writing this, 
but I just had to ... :-)

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