JJ,
you speak me out of the heart. But the interest people have in GNUstep
vary, so many like it to be a mac Clone or a porting environment for
their mac apps to linux and windows and there are commercial interests
behind that.
Many persons when thinking about a "mac clone" also think about the
geeky effects it has, more than the architecture underneath.
I'm on the "application" front since several years, but I am often
stoned by how little interest and feedback there is...
Riccardo
J. Jordan wrote:
Fred,
Well to be honest nothing worked using the SVN version of
base/back/make/gui, GNUMail, GWorkspace, Terminal all immediatly
segfaulted on launch. I don't really see that as an issue, SVN is
going to be broken from time to time and watching the IRC channel
there is enough action going on that breakage is going to occur.
That being said, GNUstep has been in development for 15 years, are the
current efforts primarily aimed at making it a clone of OSX? I f the
concept is to allow OSX applications to be easily ported to GNUstep
then that is a good plan but if the intent is to develop for OSX
without needing a MAC then I think it is doomed to fail. For me it is
all about the applications. I really like the look and feel of
GNUstep, the concepts of services, bundles and frameworks really make
sense and they are NOT well implemented on the MAC. The time is
perfect for a third FLOSS desktop, KDE has gone off on the Windows
tangent and is gaining many new users but it is loseing power-users in
droves, Gnome is Gnome and will always be Gnome, you either love it or
hate it, I hate it. Verticle menus and a verticle dock courtesy of
Windowmaker make more sense now than ever before considering the
almost universal move to wide-screen monitors. I am not a purist, I
am not saying we should be locked to the OpenStep API of 15 years ago,
there has been a lot of progress in the computer world, wifi,
bluetooth, ACPI, none of tose things were around back then. I like
the square-gray look but recognize that others do not so making things
skinnable makes sense, just allow me to keep the look I like.
Saying that GNUstep is nothing but a development environment is a bit
of a cop-out, like taking 15 years of development. hundreds of
thousands of hours of work and equating it to Visual-Basic. It is
like saying, that you build hammers that can only be used to build
more hammers, never any houses.
Please don't think that I don't appreciate the efforts of the
base/back/gui developers, without them nothing works.
Over the last couple weeks reading the mailing lists including
archives I have gotten the impression that most GNUstep developers
don't really use GNUstep, they don't use Project Center for
development, they don't use GNUMail, they do use Gorm which explains
its comparative advanced state but of course Gorm is not needed for
base/back/make development.
Users need applications, applications require application developers,
application developers need a stable API, 15 years is a long time.
-j
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