Hi Yavor, I must agree on certain things an read below my comment about ethics.
Yavor Doganov wrote:
Miguel also used the argument of the "foreign language", insisting that the GNU desktop should be written in C as the rest of the system. While Objective-C is formally another language, the learning curve from C is pretty straightforward (compared to C++ which is a completely different beast). However, rms apparently listened to that dubious argument, too.
Yes... although more than C++ it was about C#, which while a little better, was again a "new company language", like today swift, go, rust.
Ironic. Obj-C and C++ were more open back then.
I should have mentioned the ethical aspect; rms pays little attention to the technical details. GNOME is getting more and more detached from GNU, they even avoid saying it's a GNU project.
Yes, indeed, they seem ashamed of their roots, ashamed of the "G", they want to be company-like. I hope we stay true to our roots, since certain discussion and ideas are quite pulling in that direction!!!!
We need to stay true to the GNU environment: e.g use gnu autotools & make, use GNU texinfo, that is support a GNU environment and contribute to it. This includes the "touchy" subject of GCC where ideally we shoudl support them and they should support us... but it doesn't happen.
It would be best to use also GNU to develop, but there we currently have GitHub as a necessity. However the "end user" just gets the tarball and then can work without it, so while "impure" it is not an issue for e.g. distribution, end-user, packagers.
I can talk a lot about the technical part but of course it's off-topic on this list. I can't stand the aristocratic behavior of most GNOME developers, thinking they are involved in something divine and ultimately correct by nature.
Always has been, they always thought GTK was fine, when it was always crappy performance wise, first against motif then even against Win32. I proved more than once, a long time ago when there were the last Netscapes and first Mozillas, that you using on linux the native GTK version or using wine with the windows version... had the latter win hands down in resource usage, speed and responsiveness!
The mere fact that a lot of prominent projects (GCompris, Wireshark, gLabels, to name a few) moved away from GTK/GNOME speaks a lot. GNOME 3 is completely unusable without serious configuration intervention and even after that it's still unusable for me -- I have a built-in nVidious card but I use the poor free (nouveau) driver so it constantly crashes. Their insistance for hardware acceleration because "the world has moved on" naturally eliminates some of the traditional user base.
I like the steady approach, it is like an army on a march or like a ship with a low-speed internal combustion engine heading to her destination (and always arriving). The GNUstep team is small but very talented and stubborn.
Slow diesel that churns and churns and at the end wins, let's hope. It has been so in the past, let's stay true to it.
Riccardo
