Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Jeff Teunissen]

"Philippe C.D.Robert" wrote:

> On Sunday, April 13, 2003, at 02:36 AM, Jeff Teunissen wrote:

[snip]

> > Personally, I don't think there is anything that could be done to make
> > me use PC. I'm not saying that PC is bad, but from my perspective it
> > doesn't fill a need that exists. I say the same thing about PB on
> > OPENSTEP, by the way.
> 
> As I said before, PC is currently far away from being mature and
> feature complete. But I wonder then why people are always claiming that
> the duo PC+Gorm could be a good reason for using GNUstep and at the
> same time it is so little in use. The article in Linux Journal did not
> even mention ProjectCenter...

PB is decent for one-offs, or for people who are new to this whole
programming thing. For that reason alone, it's good to have...but it's not
a replacement for a proper shell environment. Perhaps if PC had a
comprehensive GDB frontend a la DDD (and a decent programmer's text
editor, with things like folding, configurable highlighting, and
brace/bracket/parenthesis matching) it would be much more useful.

> BTW arguments for PC would be automatic makefile creation, easier file
> management/handling, seamless CVS integration via a GUI or a much nicer
> debugging experience in the future, ...

GNUstep Makefiles are (for me, and most other developers using GNUstep)
too easy to write to give up the flexibility of writing them by hand. PC
and PB are neat to play with and use to throw together a trivial app, but
neither is powerful enough to make it a killer tool.

There's a (slight) benefit in file management within a project, but if I'm
editing my Makefiles with a text editor anyway, I'll already have a shell
running.

CVS integration is, IMO, a red herring. I've yet to meet a GUI CVS tool
that wasn't infuriating. There are so many useful options in cvs that most
people who use it need, that a GUI tool will almost assuredly be slower
and/or more awkward than "doing it by hand".

> >> It is IMHO too late for GNUstep to compete with KDE or Gnome, but it
> >> is (hopefully) not too late for a GNUSTEP/linux or a GNUSTEP/FreeBSD
> >> or even a GNUSTEP/Hurd (kind of the real successor to OPENSTEP/Mach)
> >> :-)
> >
> > Nonsense. Unlike the proprietary software world, we don't have to
> > worry much about the other guys.
> 
> Nonsense. Just like in the proprietary software world we are in
> competition with other projects, and from looking at the visibility we
> have, the number of GNUstep developers and so on, we pretty much lost
> this one, it seems (unless you are OK with GNUstep being a library set
> written by a few developers to be used by a few others...).

No, we are not in competition, at least not in the traditional sense --
unlike the proprietary software world, our world is not a zero-sum game.
We don't need to "take" or "win" developers and users from the Big Two, we
can merely get some of the people who are always coming into the community
by abandoning the unsustainable proprietary world. We don't need to be as
big as they (KDE/GNOME) are to create a self-sustaining (and growing)
community. Once GNUstep has enough developers (ignoring the number of
people developing for KDE or GNOME), it's self-sustaining and will
(basically) only grow, as long as the infrastructure is good...and once
there are enough developers, the user apps will come...because developers
are users too.

Visibility helps, but word of mouth is a fine (if somewhat slow) method of
acheiving that. I've gotten people (coders) interested in Objective-C and
GNUstep just by writing code and talking about this stuff in various fora.

The downside is that we can't compete with them fairly -- the upside is
that we don't have to. In our world, a better mousetrap really will bring
people to "our side".

Do The Right Thing, and the future will attend to itself.

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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| Core developer, The QuakeForge Project        http://www.quakeforge.net/
| Specializing in Debian GNU/Linux              http://www.d2dc.net/~deek/