Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Helge Hess]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> I don't think there is any problem with the notion of sharing with other 
> projects in
> principle, it's just not technically realistic due to basic architectural 
> differences...
> With many toolkits there is just no reasonable way to share - we would just 
> have to adopt
> the other toolkit and discard our existing work.  The problem with doing that 
> is that,
> our existing toolkits are overall as good as, or better than the toolkits we 
> might
> look at adopting, so while we would gain on some features, we'd lose out 
> overall.

So in what time do you think gstep-gui will reach the same level of
stability/feature-completeness as for example Qt ? After doing some
*years* of gstep-gui development without a 1.0 result, may it not indeed
be a good, even if hurting, decision  to swap to another toolkit ?
This approach is taken by almost any scripting language with great
success. On the other side Smalltalk's follow the GNUstep approach to
make everything in one language with basically no success.

> I looked at the gnome stuff, from a viewpoint of trying to integrate with 
> gstep-base
> and it simply had nothing to offer.  However, special purpose libraries (like 
> libxml)
> can reasonably be integrated, and I'm in favour of doing that where it's 
> feasable.

I think this was already discussed one time in the past ;-) Using glib
in gstep-base would at least easen using gtk+ in gstep-gui.

> I'm not sure what the future is either - but I'm sure that the OpenStep GUI 
> design is
> basically a damn good architecture - so I don't think that the technological 
> advantage
> is completely gone, though it's much diminished.
>
> Our problem is lack of developers, not poorly designed libraries.

The problem is the ratio between developers/design-quality. GNUstep has
no developers and a good design and gtk+/Qt has masses of developers and
a not mentionable worse design.

We'll see ;-)

Greetings
  Helge