Re: Opinion polls UIKit and Website...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 20 Dec 2013, at 12:47, Graham Lee <graham@iamleeg.com> wrote:

> On 20 Dec 2013, at 12:34, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:
> 
>> it definitely refutes the assertion that patches are not accepted
> 
> Sure. It’s the presentation that’s at fault. There’s an internal feeling that 
> GNUstep is doing stuff and welcomes external contribution, and an external 
> presentation of a stale bug database that isn’t linked to the source code

Looking at your patches, I see your point.
They are almost all gsweb and gdl2.

I (and I suspect the other core developers) think of GNUstep as, what I think 
Greg has tried to get across repeatedly, the core libraries/software for OSX 
compatibility.
There are other peripheral/ancilliary projects either hosted with gnustep on 
other closely related sites for tons of extra stuff people need/use but which 
aren't directly part of that.

So, when I think of the GNUstep project, I'm not thinking of all those other 
bits like gsweb, but I can see how people can think of them as part of GNUstep 
despite repeated official policy statements about what GNUstep *is*.

I guess we are a bit schizophrenic about it ... for instance there are several 
projects I maintain, with copyright assigned to the FSF under the umbrella 
GNUstep project category what I would never consider calling 'GNUstep' (the 
WebServer library for instance), but if someone said 'does GNUstep have a web 
server' I would point them to it.
I don't mean that the WebServer library is part of the GNUstep project, but 
it's built on top of libobjc/base/make and is avilable for users of GNUstep, so 
GNUstep 'has' a web server class in the sense that it's available and hosted 
with gnustep.
If I fail to respond to queries about these add-ons, and fail to deal with 
patches for those libraries, it should not reflect on GNUstep, but by 
association I guess it could.

Similarly, problems with gsweb ought not to relfect upon the main GNUstep 
project, but apparently they do. 

I don't know anything much about the workings opf savannah etc, but I guess 
what ought to be done here is make a clearer (wide) separation between all the 
separate libraries with are maintained by individuals (or not maintained), and 
GNUstep proper.  Presumably bug/patch pages should direct people to separate 
pages for things that aren't part of the main project?

> (and I wonder how many people find the source mirror on github and think 
> there hasn’t been a commit in over three months, too).

I agree ... mirroring to github seems to have been a mistake.  I'm pretty sure 
Greg wrote warnings with it to say it was a reads-only mirror, but warnings are 
not sufficient as people don't read/notice them.