All,
Looking back on my last two years as lead, I can see that it is much harder
than I originally thought it would be.
I know that I haven't always been perfect, but I'm learning. :) Also, aside
from all of that... I've suffered a few very personal losses in the past year
and a half that have distracted me a bit from GNUstep, but it's always remained
close to my heart.
GNUstep has made some significant progress in this past year in terms of
stability, completeness, and usability on UNIX-based platforms and,
particularly, on the Windows platform.
I believe that the coming year holds some promise for GNUstep since I have been
seeing more interest regarding porting apps for Mac OS X to GNUstep. There
have also been a number of new "native" GNUstep apps from GAP and from Etoile.
I think the things we need to focus on, as a project, over the next few months
are (this time in priority order):
1) Stability/Polish.
a) We're pretty stable, but there are a few places in GNUstep where we lack
"polish." :) We need to make certain that a lot of the little annoyances that
we are used to dealing with are taken care of as they make a huge impression
when someone first sees an application which uses GNUstep in action. I leave
it to other threads/discussions to hash these out, but I will mention one:
Menu/Window Focus issues. :)
2) Better compatibility with Cocoa/API completeness:
a) Determine which classes GNUstep is lacking when compared against a given
version of Cocoa (TBD).
b) Implement classes and methods identified in step a.
c) Better nib support for writing. Reading appears to work very well,
writing nibs has a few issues which I have identified and will document as bugs.
d) perhaps more...
3) Theming
4) ObjC 2.0 (this is a nice to have...) :)
I also think that it's very important for us to stick to the goals which were
set out in the blog posting I made here:
http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2006/12/plans-for-change.html
Some of the things in the list from my blog have been achieved with great
thanks to those involved in doing so (in no particular order):
* Nicola for doing such a great job on gnustep-make, and FHS support and all of
his other contributions,
* Fred for his awesome work on gnustep-gui and for helping to make Windows more
usable,
* Richard for his tireless work on gnustep-base,
* Riccardo for work on various applications in GNUstep and GNUstep GAP which
have helped to identify issues in GNUstep itself,
* Wolfgang Lux who has been a consistently excellent addition to the team since
he started contributing
* everyone else who has worked on GNUstep over the past few years.
By giving thanks to these people above, I am, by no means, minimizing the
contribution of anyone not mentioned above. :)
Other goals on the list from the blog haven't been achieved yet, but I believe
that all of those points are central to GNUstep's success.
With some effort, I believe that we can make 2009 a really good year for
GNUstep.
Thank you, GJC
Gregory Casamento -- Principal Consultant - OLC, Inc
# GNUstep Chief Maintainer
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