Re: State of the 'Step

[Gregory Casamento]

J.

Please read below....

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 4:39 AM, J. Jordan <jjordanthesailor@gmail.com> wrote:
> Fred,
>
> Well to be honest nothing worked using the SVN version of
> base/back/make/gui, GNUMail, GWorkspace, Terminal all immediatly segfaulted
> on launch.  I don't really see that as an issue, SVN is going to be broken
> from time to time and watching the IRC channel there is enough action going
> on that breakage is going to occur.
>
> That being said, GNUstep has been in development for 15 years, are the
> current efforts primarily aimed at making it a clone of OSX?

Yes.  GNUstep is currently targeting OS X and Cocoa.  I'm still
shocked that no matter how many times I say this that this meme of
"GNUstep is just OpenStep" simply refuses to lay down and die. :)

> If the concept
> is to allow OSX applications to be easily ported to GNUstep then that is a
> good plan but if the intent is to develop for OSX without needing a MAC then
> I think it is doomed to fail.

That's not the concept, it's a side effect. :)   The idea is to bring
the ease of development of Cocoa/NeXT to other operating systems.

> For me it is all about the applications.  I
> really like the look and feel of GNUstep, the concepts of services, bundles
> and frameworks really make sense and they are NOT well implemented on the
> MAC.  The time is perfect for a third FLOSS desktop, KDE has gone off on the
> Windows tangent and is gaining many new users but it is loseing power-users
> in droves, Gnome is Gnome and will always be Gnome, you either love it or
> hate it, I hate it.  Verticle menus and a verticle dock courtesy of
> Windowmaker make more sense now than ever before considering the almost
> universal move to wide-screen monitors.  I am not a purist, I am not saying
> we should be locked to the OpenStep API of 15 years ago, there has been a
> lot of progress in the computer world, wifi, bluetooth, ACPI, none of tose
> things were around back then.  I like the square-gray look but recognize
> that others do not so making things skinnable makes sense, just allow me to
> keep the look I like.

Indeed.  One of the efforts on GNUstep lately has been ubiquitous
theming.   The current look will always be available.

> Saying that GNUstep is nothing but a development environment is a bit of a
> cop-out, like taking 15 years of development. hundreds of thousands of hours
> of work and equating it to Visual-Basic.  It is like saying, that you build
> hammers that can only be used to build more hammers, never any houses.

What would you suggest we say we are?  An Operating System (we're not)
a full-up user environment (we're not).   Saying that GNUstep is a
development environment is necessary to focus the project on what's
important to us.

That being said we do always make sure that GNUstep integrates best
with WindowMaker.   So we could consider Etoile and WindowMaker as
desktop environments for GNUstep.

> Please don't think that I don't appreciate the efforts of the base/back/gui
> developers, without them nothing works.
>
> Over the last couple weeks reading the mailing lists including archives I
> have gotten the impression that most GNUstep developers don't really use
> GNUstep, they don't use Project Center for development, they don't use
> GNUMail, they do use Gorm which explains its comparative advanced state but
> of course Gorm is not needed for base/back/make development.

I, of course, use Gorm and I admit (like I said in the thread about
editors) that I don't use ProjectCenter to edit source files.   I
usually use it, though, to CREATE the projects I build since it does a
very good job of building the project structure.

One of the issues with ProjectCenter is that it has not been used,
like Gorm was, in it's own development as well as development of
almost every other app in GNUstep.   With Gorm, I am forced to "eat my
own dog food" since I use Gorm to build Gorm and extend Gorm whenever
I work on it.  The same is not the case with ProjectCenter.  If it
were used to maintain it's own project structure or, at least, that of
a few other key GNUstep apps it would receive more work as a result.

> Users need applications, applications require application developers,
> application developers need a stable API, 15 years is a long time.

Indeed.   One of my focuses as maintainer of late has been community
building.  I've tried to take the opportunity to speak about GNUstep
and spread the word as much as possible.

> -j
>
> On 2010-02-14 22:34:15 +0100 Fred Kiefer <fredkiefer@gmx.de> wrote:
>
>> Great to hear how much GNUstep software you are using. But being a
>> developer I am most interested in what didn't work :-(
>> Why did you have to abandon your attempt to compile GNUstep from SVN?
>> (We switched over from CVS years ago, if you really tried CVS then this
>> was a very old version of GNUstep)
>>
>> And are there any interesting patches on the debian patch system for
>> GNUstep that didn't make it upstream?
>>
>> Fred
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Gregory Casamento
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell)