Summary of Workshop "3rd Party Solutions within the GNUstep Community" at FOSDEM

[Oliver Langer]

Hi all,

find below a summary of our workshop results at FOSDEM. Please  
contact me if something is missing!

In addition to this text i have also the following materials:
- a formatted PDF output of this summary
- a mind map
- a PNG output of the mind map

**May someone put those materials on the wiki or give me write access  
to it?**.

I hope that this is helpful to you!

Regards,
  Oliver


                What to do with 3rd Party Solutions within the  
GNUstep Community?

                                      Developer Workshop at FOSDEM 2007

                                                   Summary of Results

Abstract
========

The goal of this workshop is to discuss questions dealing with 3rd  
party solutions and GNUstep and to summarize the results. At the  
beginning we may identify projects which seem to reinvent the wheel.  
Such projects are those implementing add-ons which have been  
developed before - logging functionality is a good example for this.  
Also, we may focus projects (re-) implementing GNUstep base  
functionality, like e.g.  mySTEP. Then, having these projects figured  
out we may elaborate the potential reasons behind.

By starting to identify reasons for "duplicating" code we may shift  
the discussion to a different perspective and ask ourself, what  
GNUstep brings to the application programmer? Especially we may work  
out the requirements of the "typical" GNUstep application programmer.  
Collecting all information, thus bringing the potential reasons for  
"duplicated" codes, plus the capabilities of and the requirements for  
GNUstep altogether, we may then find out approaches for the handling  
of 3rd party solutions within the GNUstep community.

Since this session is meant as a workshop, the abstract presented  
hereby should be regarded as a collection of hints and all developers  
are warmly invited to actively participate in the discussion. The  
session will be moderated and organized by Helge Hess and Oliver Langer.

Moderation: Helge Hess, Oliver Langer

Schedule: 2 hours


What we did
===========

We identified projects which have the same or similar goals at least.  
As a result a list of subjects with their related projects has been  
worked out. Based on this list we wrote down potential reasons for  
these duplicates. Next we tried to find some solutions to resolve  
some duplicates.

Find below the list of duplicates, issues and solutions. As expected,  
we were far away from having all and complete solutions.


Results
=======

** List of Projects **

Following a list of subjects and related projects:
ObjCRuntime:  AppleRuntime, GNU Runtime, Cocotron, (David)
Foundation:   libFoundation, gstep-base, Cocoa, myStep, Cocotron,  
mgStep, SideStep
AppKit:       gstep-gui, Apple, Cocotron, myStep, mgStep, (SideStep)
Mime:         gstep-base, sope-mine, Pantomine, EDMessage, MailCore
XML:          gstep-base, Sope-XML, Cocoa
Database:     SQLClient, EDL2, sope-gdl1, CoreData, MulleEOF, BDB, FT
Web:          gstep-web, Web-Server, SOPE, myStep
Logging:      (gstep-base), Encore, sope-core, (Brainstorm), Log4Cocoa

** Reasons for Duplicates **

We identified the following reasons:
- License
- NIH
- Historical not available
- Quality
- Code sucks
- Stability
- Coding style
- Copyright assignment
- Communication
- Information
- Parallel work
- Not asking for existing solutions
- Design decisions
- Incompleteness
- Deployment

Additionally we identified:
- Many links are broken on the website
- No public access for wiki
- With ObjectiveC 2.0 the runtime will not be compatible to Apple.

Reasons wrt. to subjects/projects:
- ObjCRuntime
  - Projects underly different licenses
- myStep
  - historical
  - Different goals

Due to limited time we were not able to work out the reasons for the  
other duplicates. We found out that in a lot of cases communication  
seems to be the major lack. E.g. people don't ask for existing  
solutions or for issues they have with a certain piece of software;  
finding related information on the web seems to be an issue as well.

** Solutions **

Solutions being stated:
- libFoundation team is willing to merge their project with gnustep
- myStep team is putting efforts in merging/exchanging (at least  
partially)
  with gnustep

Ideas mentioned for handling such merges:
- the projects should use branches in the same repository.
- gnustep is willing to share its repository
- code is merged step by step from branch to branch

Additional solutions we worked out:
- Better quality through reusage
- Use common repositories for similar projects and migrate step by step
- Steps/Approaches (project plans, issues with existing software et  
cetera)
  should be communicated
- Use Wiki as a central point for announcements and discussions
- Wiki of CocoDev works fine and may be a good reference
- Push more and more to the Wiki and only the musts on the GS web site
- Write the goals of GS and the differences to other projects for the  
public