GNUstep ready to go! (was: The state of GNUstep packaging)

[Andreas Höschler]

Hi,

> All in all, as a repository maintainer, I feel that I owe it to my
> users to provide easy, clean installation, and a usable (and
> good-looking environment) ready for them the instant the packages are
> installed.  I don't want my users to  have to be hackers; I want to be
> the hacker, and let them be the users.  It is only this way that we
> will really spread GNUstep use beyond the tight-knit community that
> currently uses it.

The "tight-knit community"!? Just a few thoughts of mine. I get the 
impression - response rate on the list is very high in the evening and 
on the weekend, less high at normal business hours - that GNUstep 
currently is a toy for some freaks that learned to appreciate the 
advantages of Objective-C and the open source idea behind the project. 
That's ok for me. I consider me being such a freak. However, it at 
least  seems to me that GNUstep has less momentum in the market 
(Software Industry) than it could have. You can do (at least) two 
things with GNUstep from a commercial point of view (hey, we all need 
to do something for our living, why not use GNUstep for this as well).

1) You can develop a super fancy GNUstep-based application that 
everybody wants to have, e.g. a scientifical workdprocessor that blows 
"Scientific Word" away and hope to sell it 1000.000 times to compensate 
your development costs. Here we have the problem of the tiny 
installation base. The goal of the "GNUstep packaging" project as I 
understand it is to have a ready to install (with a double click) 
GNUstep package on any Linux distribution CD, so that Linux 
installation base = GNUstep installation base. Then providers of above 
applications would have a decent target platform. I pretty much 
appreciate the efforts in this direction. I bet as soon as this target 
platform (installation base) is there, vendors will be more willing to 
invest money in portig or redeveloping apps on GNUstep. We (Smartsoft) 
at least would...

2) You are in the project business. You develop highly customized 
business applications and are also responsible for the installation and 
maintenance at the customer. Here a GNUstep installation package is no 
issue. You can always install GNustep from CVS since you (the hacker) 
are the one that installs everything, not the user of the software 
(customer). However, there are still other issues to be aware of. Open 
Source projects are evolving and per se can't be as stable as e.g. 
MacOSX/Cocoa (more testing before each release). We were more than once 
confronted with the fact that we had something running with one version 
of GNUstep, installed a newer one (because a newly implemented feature 
was needed) and our application broke, since other stuff in the 
meanwhile had been modified that caused severe problems with our app 
and/or environment. This should not be an attack against GNUstep, the 
opposite is my aim. This simply is the nature of open source projects 
and one has to live with that and spend enough time on testing and 
fixing a new GNUstep version before putting into production.

I see that there is work in progress to improve problem 1). I was 
wondering what we could do to help with challenge 2). Customers are 
happy if they get powerful applications in a short time for a payable 
amount of money. Cocoa/GNUstep/OPENSTEP should always be the choice 
here. We had some decent success in convincing customers to set on this 
platform. But I think here is much more potential. It would help a lot 
if we could make the power of GNUstep and the community of GNUstep 
developers more transparent to potential customers. I for example would 
like to see a maintained list of

• professional Cocoa/GNUstep developers (name, location, contact 
parameter, availability,...)
• companies that are specialized in developing application for 
Cocoa/GNUstep in Objective-C
• Job Offerings
• Projects (GNUstep based) / Features (still missing in GNUstep) 
currently being developed by whom

With projects I don't mean "Spare time developer XX is working on 
ImageViewer.app" or the like. With projects I mean "Company YY is 
working on a 200.000 EUR project (GNUstep based) for customer ZZ in 
country YZ)".

This list had the following advantages. A customer might argument "Nice 
that you can develop efficiently with GNUstep but what if you get 
killed tomorrow in an accident or your company goes down?" A quick 
glance on the list and I would say: "No problem, the next GNUstep 
specialized (partner) company is XXX in YYY only ZZ km away." It might 
also happen that the companies internal development capacities aren't 
sufficent for a given project. So a quick glance on the list - 
availability of developers - and the capacities are available. Another 
thing, there might be a still missing feature in GNUstep - not yet 
implemented part of the OPENSTEP/Cocoa specification - e.g. NSImage 
drawAtPoint:... or support for NSComboxes in NSTableColumns. If there 
is a real need for such a feature - project needs to be completed - 
there is often also money available to get this working, which means 
there is money available to improve GNUstep.

• Company XXX needs NSImage drawAtPoint:... working and offers YYY $ 
for the job to be completed
• Freelancer YYY (might live and work anywhere on earth) offers to do 
the job "immediately" for this amount of money
• Feature is integrated in the GNUstep source tree and the project of 
company XXX can move on
• All are happy

I would like to see a website - ideally powered by GNUstep -  that is 
able to bring all these pieces together. We would volunteer to do it 
but if anybody else has other suggestions...

Just my 2 cents...

Regards,

   Andreas