GNUstep on Windows, "desktop" bundles...

[Nicolas Roard]

Hi,

As I got a window machine for a few days on my desk, I just couldn't 
try to compile GNUstep ;-)
Although it's not completely straightforward, overall it was a lot 
simpler than I expected, thanks to
the gnustep-base installer and the recent explications sent on the ml 
by larry cow ;-)
I had some troubles compiling libtiff, but using the dll from the 
gnuwin32 packages worked nicely. In fact
I guess it's probably better to do everything using the gnuwin32 
packages...
Applications behave surprinsingly well too (eg, er... they seems to 
work :), the most annoying things are just the
GDI backend (I guess it's the one to blame for not handling 
transparency and thus having theses black areas
in images ;-) and the vertical menus -- they definitely are not at 
their place on Windows... and sometimes they
behave, hm, strangely.
Here is two screenshots, the first one is helpviewer.app and 
finger.app, the second one is with the same apps
plus Preferences.app and a color scheme matching the windows one (and 
magically the gnustep apps looks much less
"alien" to the windows env, notice the winzip window):
http://www.roard.com/screenshots/helpviewer-on-windows.png
http://www.roard.com/screenshots/gnustep-windows.png

Anyway. Apart for providing nice screenshots, I think it will 
definitely be good to focus a bit more on the windows backend -- a LOT 
of people are interested, and it's mostly working... A good start 
would be to have an installer for gui as well -- it should'nt be that 
hard ? I'll perhaps try to do something with Wix (the xml installer 
recently published by microsoft..) -- if I can keep the window machine 
a few more days... but if somebody else knows how to do an installer, 
go on :-)

Ideally, I think we'd like to have a "GNUstep developer" install and a 
"GNUstep runtime" install (for people who just want to use GNUstep..)

Which also bring the second point of this mail... even with a good and 
easy to use installer, and even with a gui theme matching  the Windows 
GUI, GNUstep apps won't blend easily, because too many things are done 
as if GNUstep was it's own OS rather than a cross-platform development 
environment. In order to have gui applications blending easily, we 
need to have things like menu in windows, use of the local file panel, 
tracking of the color scheme, etc. And that's probably the same thing 
if we want to run GNUstep apps under KDE/GNOME. Alex Malmberg once 
raised the possibility of having "desktop" bundles, that is, isolate 
all the specific code to "blend" in a particular desktop 
(Windows,KDE,GNOME,Backbone,Garma,XFCE,CDE,ROX,etc.) in separate 
bundles -- a clean solution. Do people agree on that idea ? and what 
kind of things do we need to abstract ?

What I can list is :
- color schemes
- menu policy (vertical, horizontal, in windows, etc.)
- theme
- open/save panels
- iconification..
- pasteboard
- notifications

Any other ideas ?

--
Nicolas Roard