Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> Hi Helge,
> 
> a little late, but ...
> 
> On Sunday, April 6, 2003, at 10:33 PM, Helge Hess wrote:
>> Philippe C.D.Robert wrote:
>>> Well, you cannot deny that there has been made much progress wrt the
>>> AppKit part of GNUstep in the last 1, 2 years.
>>
>> It has made a lot of progress regarding completeness of just the
>> implementation of just the GUI library. There is still little testing
>> by application level developers and even less testing by application
>> users.
> 
> That's true unfortunately. Personally I notice that I get almost no
> feedback wrt ProjectCenter (nor any other app I wrote). Now either they
> are perfect (...) or nobody uses them really, I guess it is the
> latter... :-| The question now is how can we change that and/or who can
> help us with this?
> 

I'll chip in at this moment... I've been following the development of
GNUstep for a little over a year, after dismissing it completely three
years ago. I've tried to follow the various tutorials I found online, but
I've never had a version of GNUstep (including all the applications that
compile with each version) that allowed me to complete even a simple
tutorial. Not without ProjectCenter, or Gorm, or WindowMaker crashing, 
or developing rendering, or focus, or any other kind of issues. Too many, 
in fact, to report, even if I were able to find GNUstep's bugzilla.

And then, quite a few of the applications listed for GNUstep on
www.gnustep.org either don't exist anymore (Lusernet -- horrible name, or
that code editor), or don't compile (all the music-related apps, for
instance). And while the general interface design that speaks from what
exists is still very good, the actual implementation is not all that good.
(Eeek! Do you really want to quit me!, or GNUmail's 'you haven't got the
GNUmail dir, please mkdir it, and then touch four filenames, and restart')

I don't want to just grouse -- but whenever I try to teach myself to hack
the existing applications, I am lost in a maze of twisty passages, with no
clear exits. The best thing that could happen to GNUstep would be to admit
that it won't get anywhere without committing to being a desktop
environment, and building one that could compete with KDE, Gnome or OS X.

Because, if it's just about an easy platform to write apps that can be
compiled for Windows, X11 and OS X, I'd just as soon use Qt. It might cost
a bit of money on OS's that also cost money, but it's just as easy to
program to.

> 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) :-)

It's never too late to start competing; but to compete one needs to offer
something compelling.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org