Re: State of the 'Step

[Riccardo Mottola]

JJ,

you speak me out of the heart. But the interest people have in GNUstep 
vary, so many like it to be a mac Clone or a porting environment for 
their mac apps to linux and windows and there are commercial interests 
behind that.
Many persons when thinking about a "mac clone" also think about the 
geeky effects it has, more than the architecture underneath.

I'm on the "application" front since several years, but I am often 
stoned by how little interest and feedback there is...


Riccardo

J. Jordan wrote:
> Fred,
>
> Well to be honest nothing worked using the SVN version of 
> base/back/make/gui, GNUMail, GWorkspace, Terminal all immediatly 
> segfaulted on launch.  I don't really see that as an issue, SVN is 
> going to be broken from time to time and watching the IRC channel 
> there is enough action going on that breakage is going to occur.
>
> That being said, GNUstep has been in development for 15 years, are the 
> current efforts primarily aimed at making it a clone of OSX? I f the 
> concept is to allow OSX applications to be easily ported to GNUstep 
> then that is a good plan but if the intent is to develop for OSX 
> without needing a MAC then I think it is doomed to fail.  For me it is 
> all about the applications.  I really like the look and feel of 
> GNUstep, the concepts of services, bundles and frameworks really make 
> sense and they are NOT well implemented on the MAC.  The time is 
> perfect for a third FLOSS desktop, KDE has gone off on the Windows 
> tangent and is gaining many new users but it is loseing power-users in 
> droves, Gnome is Gnome and will always be Gnome, you either love it or 
> hate it, I hate it.  Verticle menus and a verticle dock courtesy of 
> Windowmaker make more sense now than ever before considering the 
> almost universal move to wide-screen monitors.  I am not a purist, I 
> am not saying we should be locked to the OpenStep API of 15 years ago, 
> there has been a lot of progress in the computer world, wifi, 
> bluetooth, ACPI, none of tose things were around back then.  I like 
> the square-gray look but recognize that others do not so making things 
> skinnable makes sense, just allow me to keep the look I like.
>
> Saying that GNUstep is nothing but a development environment is a bit 
> of a cop-out, like taking 15 years of development. hundreds of 
> thousands of hours of work and equating it to Visual-Basic.  It is 
> like saying, that you build hammers that can only be used to build 
> more hammers, never any houses.
>
> Please don't think that I don't appreciate the efforts of the 
> base/back/gui developers, without them nothing works.
>
> Over the last couple weeks reading the mailing lists including 
> archives I have gotten the impression that most GNUstep developers 
> don't really use GNUstep, they don't use Project Center for 
> development, they don't use GNUMail, they do use Gorm which explains 
> its comparative advanced state but of course Gorm is not needed for 
> base/back/make development.
>
> Users need applications, applications require application developers, 
> application developers need a stable API, 15 years is a long time.
>
> -j