Hi list, This person was, of course, very rude and very unfair to Gregory Casamento. His obvious dissatisfaction with current GNUstep project, however, reflects my own state of mind.
My interest in GNUstep stems from the desire for powerful and practical graphical programing library for Unix. In the line from pure X - Motif - GTK - Qt I was inclined towards Qt, but none looked very exciting. The GNUstep made huge leap over those technologies in the right direction, and I was very happy as I though we are getting the definitive programming environment for complex applications that's far better than enything else in existence (it was in 1998). I still maintain my position that the creation of the superior development platform for modern Unix systems (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD and that's, probably, it) is the primary meaning of this project. The Windows and OS X compatibility, while being nice, is, IMHO, not as important. While many people here seem to think in terms of porting, I believe that new development bears greater potential. I believe there are enough people who have their own powerful ideas that would be happy to implement them with our superior tools - if we provide ones. However, we do not have such tools to show, because the core libraries - I mean four of the packages taken together - are still incomplete. Since I'm writing some image editor I happen to know that writing of images in any format other than tiff is not implemented (and most people need jpegs or pngs instead). We do not have a single backend that works perfectly. The arts backend is prohibitely slow on remote connection. Xlib does not support rotation and poorly supports transparency. There are cairo backend in development, but it's not released yet. I often connect to my home machine from work, and use X windows over ssh and then cable internet provider. Since GNUstep is extremely slow on that connection even with xlib it exludes any GNUstep program as a viable alternative to other X clients (but emacs, for instance, works reasonably fast). These are things I can claim from my personal experience, but from reading this mailing list I got the impression that there are other unfinished areas. Yet Gregory Casamento writes: "The libraries are complete in every sence that they need to be." By what standards? It seems to me that the project lost its leadership and its focus. Good leaders can set the goals and show path from one goal to another. I think we need that. Instead, it seems, we start things like facelifting, windows port, desktop environments without completing the foundation, beginning the new project without finishing the old. That way there is nothing solid to show to the mankind at any point in time - for years. I believe this is the most important GNUstep problem right now. Then if we get a person who is able to contribute there is another thing that I consider the second most important problem - the copyright assignment to FSF. This topic deserves another message with a different subject line, here I can only say that it presents a natural obstacle for people who, like me, wants their work to be recognized by others. Thus the Nextbuntu's idea on removing this requirement seems to me quite appealing. To summarize: before going into new desktop environments, please finish the core gui/back libraries to let people learn and use them for their own purposes. Declare specific API version - being it Mac OSX 10.2.7 or not - and make it work completely under at least one platform. Thank you and sorry for being so long. --Tima _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list Discuss-gnustep@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
