Re: What's the new direction?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Kevin Ingwersen wrote:
> Hello!
>
> I have been flooded with a lot of emails from the mailing list as of recently - 
> but due to school and the like, I haven’t been able to participate much - in 
> fact, I deleted most emails.
happens from time to time. It's mostly a discussion of people with real 
and concrete problems, good and less-good ideas trying to push things 
around. We had this with office suites, HTML-engines, themes, website 
content... People try to convince the few ones that are "doing" to do 
things they need/want. Most often it is done by non-coders, spectators 
or by ex-coders become cynic and less active. However, I even contribute 
to it myself when I need something which I don't do myself.

If things do not deteriorate, they may be actually useful: rarely 
consensus can be reached after days or weeks. Either consensus comes 
immediately or things will just carry on, get off-topic.
It's open-source discussion :)
However, sometimes people speak up who don't speak normally, new ideas 
or problems get mentioned... if you can be detached it is a source of 
information.

However, this time it is getting really too astray and too boring. It 
robbed me too much time.
> What I however wanted to know now is, what is the direction?
The one you want? :)
Luckily things will not change too much, but gradually butate, improve 
and GNUstep will continue to exist. If what you see to day is of your 
liking, I hope it will be tomorrow too and perhaps a little more, not a 
little less.
GNUstep can incorporate many spirits, it already does. It becomes just 
more difficult to state them on a website, for example. Everyone will 
think his own direction is the most important.
> In the kickstarter thread, I saw that things like App Stores were mentioned - I 
> want to make a small note here. Me and a friend are working on an SDK that lets 
> people develop applications using HTML or even dynamic languages like PHP. The 
> first application, the first big one, that will be based on this, is drag0n. 
> Its a package manager, and in rough sense, an app store-thing. Currently, it 
> only runs on mac. But it has one more, rather important option: it runs a 
> toolchain underneath itself. Hence, it can build packages using ninja or make, 
> autoconf or cmake. I am working on integrating GNUstep in here - and basing the 
> SDK itself off GNUstep too.
Looks like a bit generic and confusing, but I don't want to ruin your 
enthusiasm. As you proceed you will narrow it down and improve it. Or 
make experience, eventually scrap it and focus on something new 
capitalizing on the previous experience.
> If this project works as expected, a new 3rd party „appstore“ would exist. I 
> have my feet in varous scenes where that project is being awaited for since a 
> while now. That also includes the restrictness of apple’s App Store.
>
> But that brings up the question: How to best re-distribute GNUstep apps? I 
> myself can do that by using a programm called dyldbundler. I can just bundle 
> all the libraries or frameworks just as I need them.
Well GNUstep app on which platform? Just a quick sketch:
- on Mac you will probably generate a native application. At most, 
incorporate inside needed frameworks
- on Windows you can make either a mega-big-package with script which I 
think I sent you, or make a NSIS installer, perfectly "windows like", 
which would have as a prerequisite the official gnustep package as a 
runtime.
- on Linux or most BSD the best thing is to actually package with the 
respective packaging system. You need to track many different 
dependencies, etc. You can't make one big static blob.

In GAP we laid down the specifications of an Installer app, however 
given that we don't have a pure GS environment and we do run on e.g. 
Ubunt or OpenBSD, it is a low-priority tool, since things are best 
handled by having a native package.

Riccardo