Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Let me play the advocatus diaboli for one part,

Am 12.09.2013 um 10:51 schrieb Gregory Casamento:

> All excellent feedback.   Agreed on all points 
> 
> On Thursday, September 12, 2013, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 11 Sep 2013, at 17:58, Gregory Casamento <greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 2) I should have been more realistic in my goals on the kickstarter.  We 
> > are, honestly around 10.3 in some APIs, 10.4 in others and 10.7 in others.  
> > An honest assessment of our states on a class by class, method by method 
> > level is what's really needed.
> 
> I believe that 'compatibility with OS X 10.x' as a goal is fundamentally 
> flawed, for three reasons:
> 
> First, we're only claiming compatibility for a small number of frameworks.  
> If an application needs QTKit or AVFoundation or whatever from one of these 
> releases, we won't have it.  The claim of '10.x compatibility' will be taken 
> as meaning that any code that works on that version of OS X will work with 
> GNUstep, and that's not feasible (even for 10.1, because code that old likely 
> uses a load of Carbon cruft).
> 
> Second, no applications actually use all of the APIs in a particular release. 
>  A better approach would be to find some open source OS X-only applications 
> that only work with OS X 10.x or later and ensure that we have all of the 
> APIs that they need.  This gives the same PR benefits ('FooApp requires OS X 
> 10.x, but runs fine on *BSD/Linux'), and means that the new APIs that we 
> implement get immediate testing.
> 
> Third, if we struggle and get full 10.6 compatibility for Foundation and 
> AppKit, people will say 'but 10.6 is ancient, 10.9 is out now!'  In spite of 
> the fact that we may be supporting all of the commonly-used features from 
> 10.7 and 10.8, if this is our bar then it means that we always appear to lag 
> behind where we are.
> 
> If we want WebKit (which we do!),

I am not sure we want it. What we (maybe) want is to have the WebKit API so 
that users of the GNUstep frameworks can write browsers.

> then the first step would be to run some analysis on the WebKit code and see 
> what CoreFoundation APIs it needs, and what methods on which Cocoa classes it 
> uses.  We should then produce a list of these, cross off the ones that are 
> missing, and make 'implement these methods, which would allow WebKit to run 
> on GNUstep' the goal.  This is a concrete goal where people can reasonably 
> assess how difficult it is (and therefore how much it would cost to 
> implement).  We could even assign a bounty to each function and method and 
> pay it out once someone writes an implementation that passes code review.

Only if we decide to port code from the Webit project to GNUstep or support the 
WebKit project by sending GNUstep related patches to them, we would need the 
steps described here.

But there is a different approach available since 5 years. It is called "Simple 
WebKit" and is part of GNUstep. The SWK code is not bloated as WebKit is and is 
completely written in Objective-C giving it a more readable structure. It is 
quite clear how the cross-off list for SWK looks like (and there is even an 
issue tracker). But except Riccardo, Richard, Fred and myself, almost nobody 
did contribute so far...

Now you may say: SWK does not have the latest fancy things from WebKit and is 
not as well tested and debugged and trimmed for speed.

Yes, that is right, but it is already better than a missing WebKit port, i.e. 
lacking any functionality. SimpleWebKit has HTML (4) and a lot of CSS (3). but 
is still lacking JavaScript (except a JavaScript parser). The most noticeable 
thing with HTML is lack of Tables because they are missing in GUI (i.e. if we 
upgrade the GUI API to 10.6 we will magically have tables in SWK). So one could 
say it is more than 50% done...

But is there a fundamental difference of finding missing APIs to WebKit from 
contributing missing things to SimpleWebKit?
I think, it is basically the same task: testing, coding, submitting patches, 
thinking about architecture etc.

So from the fact that nobody did port WebKit in 5 years and there isn't much 
contribution to SimpleWebKit, I conclude that we do not want to have any WebKit 
compatible framework within GNUstep... Or we want to have it but don't want to 
collaborate on it.

BTW: the same holds for CoreData - 80-90% complete code is there for years but 
has not been advanced.

> 
> We should also approach companies like Omni Group and ask them if they can 
> provide a list of APIs that they need to port their products, and if they 
> would be willing to match funding.  We could almost certainly provide them 
> with an automated tool that they can run on their codebase that would give 
> them a pretty clear idea of the OS X APIs that they use.  Actually, providing 
> such a tool with the ability to produce a report against the current version 
> of GNUstep showing what is missing would be very helpful for a lot of 
> projects.  In some cases, it might be possible to meet half way and say 
> 'well, this API isn't really core functionality, so we could make it 
> optional, and if GNUstep provides these ones then we get a Linux port...'
> 
> Other things I'd have liked to see on the Kickstarter list that are more 
> achievable:
> 
> - Finish Opal / CoreGraphics implementation
> - Provide an Android back end (using GLES and Cairo)
> - Ship an Android SDK
> 
> David
> 
> -- Sent from my Apple II
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Gregory Casamento
> Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
> yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
> (240)274-9630 (Cell)
> http://www.gnustep.org
> http://heronsperch.blogspot.com
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