Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 87, Issue 24

[Nicolas Roard]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 3:51 PM, J. Jordan <jjordanthesailor@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nicolas,
>
> I recoginze that this disscussion comes up every few years/months and it
> usually alienates a lot of developers and users.  Perhaps it would be less
> confusing if gnustep.org didn't have an applications section and if there
> was not a gnustep applications mailiing list since there are not supposed to
> be any applications.  But that kind of brings me back to the question of
> what are you supposed to do with a development environment that is not
> supposed to develop any applicaions?

I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion :)

> I see your point about QT and there are QT apps out there but KDE very
> quickly took up the title of Desktop Enviroment based on QT. GAP is just a
> few applications at the moment, they are doing good things but I don't get
> the impression they are building a desktop.  Backbone has been dead for many
> years.  There are many good applications out there built on the GNUstep
> libraries, it is confusing  if you say I should not call those GNUstep
> applications.  So I guess what we need is a name for everything GNUstep is
> not, LastStep, OtherStep, I don't know, should be something catchy and still
> pay tribute to NeXTstep roots.

Basically you are saying that existing projects such as GAP aren't
nearly as complete as what you'd want, and therefore the logical
conclusion would be to not help them but redirect gnustep developer's
efforts to start working on yet another desktop based on gnustep ?

My point was that it would be more productive if you would help GAP
for example than complain about GNUstep. I perfectly understand your
points and what you'd like to have, believe me, but this is an
open-source project -- the only sure way of making things progress is
to participate. At the end, votes and decisions in an open-source
project are made in code. In our case it was decided to focus on the
frameworks and not a desktop, considering other projects are free to
(and do) work on a gnustep-based desktop.

If you want a NeXT-like GNUstep project, I'd say your best bet is to
help GAP, as it seems much closer to what you want; you don't have to
be a programmer to do so, and I'm sure there's a ton of things they'd
be gladly be helpful for that don't involve writing code. But trying
to convince GNUstep developers to stop working on it in order to start
writing applications (because, you may not have realised, but this is
essentially what you advocate, as there's a finite supply of
developers and time) is quite unlikely to be highly successful.

> Sorry I bothered you, I was just trying to drum up some interest in GNUstep
> (or whatever I am supposed to call it), guess that is not what you want.

...

I quite obviously do not have a problem with drumming up interest in
GNUstep, if you'd know me. What I have a slight discomfort with is
your proposed solution to do so.

>  I'll stick to the apps-gnustep mailing list in the future but of course
> there aren't supposed to be any apps so I'm sure you can ban me from there
> if you wish.

Did I ever mentionned banning ?.. don't put words in my mouth, please,
it's a cheap rethorical tool.

You probably read me as harsher than necessary -- I'm truly neither
upset or angry with your proposal, it's just that it's clearly not the
current focus on the project, that other projects' goals would align
much better (GAP or even Étoilé), and accessorily we went through that
discussion so many times in the past that it feels old.

-- 
Nicolas Roard
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound
they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams