Fred, No one is putting down Cocotron. My earlier assessment wasn't meant as a negative, only to represent what I had found in Cocotron in comparison to GNUstep after a quick review.
You are right in the sense that there are things we can learn from Cocotron. They have done some pretty interesting things. That being said... we are simply wondering why, when GNUstep is the most visible of all Cocoa clones, someone would go through so much trouble to duplicate our efforts. It's a very understandable question. As far as understanding how they think, Richard and I have been talking to them. Later, GJC -- Gregory Casamento ## GNUstep Chief Maintainer ----- Original Message ---- From: Fred Kiefer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Gregory John Casamento <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: GNUstep Discussion <[email protected]>; Helge Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, December 25, 2006 9:41:47 AM Subject: Re: Cocotron Sorry to join this discussion so late, I had other things to do the last few days :-) Let my state first that I don't like the way most posters on this mailing list are addressing the subject. I do fully agree in them not seeing the need for yet another GNUstep clone, but this is really just our view of it. If we write about cocotron that way, we will never reach it's programmers. What we should try to do is understand how they think about their project themselves. See what is good about it and try to learn from it. Only after having done that step should we go out and ask them why they don't join GNUstep. Doing so in a long mail that lists what we like about their project and their code, is something different than sending out mails that list what GNUstep does a lot better. Sure GNUstep is more complete in almost any regard, at least I hope so having spend so much time on it :-) Still it is very impressive to see how much the developers of cocotron have achieved in rather little time. If I understand their comments correctly there are just two main developers. But if they keep up the current speed they will overtake GNUstep in a year or two. So what do I find great in this project? Some of these points have already been listed by others and you may have other items to add. - Framework support for MS Windows. This is something that should go back into the main line of the GNU binary utilities and thereby help GNUstep as well. - Basic CoreGraphics library. it really makes live easier for people porting over from MacOSX. - Cross-compilation from XCode. This is no must for GNUstep, but again it makes live easier. - Aiming for MacOS 10.4, where GNUstep is still lagging behind. - Grouping class files that belong together in sub directories. - Clean code without all the backwards compatible stuff we sometimes need in GNUstep. - Consistent coding style. OK, this is much easier to achieve when the coding gets done by just two people in one year. Still, I find it makes code so much easier to read. - Their blog (http://www.cocotron.org/blog/) is much more fun then the GNUstep ones :-) I would expect that even when we all agree, to take over most of these points from cocotron (which I don't expect based on the previous discussion), still the cocotron people will keep up their own separate project. Fine for me. I think the LGPL is important and copyright assignment to the FSF is too. If somebody disagrees here, there is nothing to be done. What we should try to reach anyway is a mutually agreed statement about the similarities and differences between GNUstep, cocotron, mySTEP and libFoundation that should be placed on all different web sites. That will make it easier for users to choose which framework they want to build on. Of course, I hope it will be GNUstep most of the time. Cheers, Fred _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
