Re: Incremental adoption path

[Svetlana A. Tkachenko]

David Chisnall wrote:
> One thing that I have learned, from Étoilé and other projects, is that
> you are almost guaranteed to fail if you do not have an incremental
> adoption path.

I do not know what we think from the engineering perspective, but from
my personal experience attempts to theme programs so that they look
'pretty' on another desktop has caused a large number of people to think
that 'linux desktop' is a collection of garbage that someone put
together on one table. Even if the buttons are styled correctly, the UX
remains inconsistent. This is the case with all of my relatives who
tried Linux as a desktop system - they all went away from it in dislike,
or they went into one specific 'pure' desktop. None of them liked the
mixed desktop thing. One app had a button here, another had a button in
another place. One had integration with file manager but another one did
not. It was outright plainly worse for them than what they had before
with their Windows and Macs. I can't tell about users migrating from
GNOME (they already like it as is and I think that like me, they would
either stay with gnome or go to gnustep completely (I did the latter
because I already know how to do network managing and displays stuff and
input layout stuff from the command line)).

There are a few things I would suggest to make a 'one-step switch to
gnustep' easier for users:
* Set up a page on the wiki where we lists TODO tasks (like the
Application wishlist) and potential mentors, and attract more people
from the Google Summer of Code. They would probably be good at doing the
needed effort as discussed earlier (xrandr interface, network manager
interface, I would add input layout setup pane, the web browser,
improving the pdf program for multi-page support, and so on). I do not
remember anyone coming from the last year GSoC, and I do not know why.
* Another question is writing of documentation. Each program on Windows
or Mac has a thorough documentation in its help menu, in any language.
With GNUstep this is not always the case.
** I am writing a new tiny program as an exercise and I do not know how
to add help files to it. If someone could help with this, it would be
nice. 
** I also need a proper instructions regarding a developer-friendly
GNUStep environment in which I can easily add documentation or
documentation translations for existing apps. What do you guys use? I
use Debian but I do not know how to package for it and if I want to add
new things to existing gnustep programs then I probably need to run a
non-packaged version, but I do not know of an organized way to do it.
*** This includes developer documentation in HelpViewer.app. I ran wget
on gnustep.org and/or gnustep.it and the like, but I think that having
it in HelpViewer would make things a lot easier. The HelpViewer that
comes with Debian comes with no documentation in it and is just empty
and I do not know how to fill it.

-- 
Svetlana A. Tkachenko
Member of the Free Software Foundation
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org www.freenode.net