subject:"Changes I've been thinking of..."

Hi,

 I'm one of them. I got interested into GNUstep also because of it looks.
 I love windowmaker. It is the only thing I use on free Unices.
 It is sleek, unobtrusive, professional. The same should be true for
  GNUstep. GNUstep stuff is generally almost there, but there are drawing
  glitches, ugly icons, imperfectly done interfaces which makes it not on
  par with openstep. And we should be even better. Improved, more complete.

I really dislike the term looks professional. How do you define looks 
professional? I think the only sane definition of looks professional is that 
something that looks professional is something that is used for professional 
work. By this definition Windows XP / Vista, KDE, Gnome and MacOS X all look 
professional because they are used for professional work.

Why is a user interface more professional if all buttons are squared, 
everything is gray and there are no gradients? 

In my opinion, to do professional work, it is much more important to have 
professional tools (IDEs etc.) then to have no gradients and square buttons.

 Also, this concept of outdated is really ridiculous. Style has no
 time. People like Rolex. Waterman. Montblanc. Breguet.
 People like Vetiver, 4711 Koelnisch Wasser.
 People like Veuve Cliquot Poinsardin.
 These items are made as our fathers or our grand-fatehrs could have
 bought them. Serious people like them because they are masterpieces.

Well, most people I know (scientists, engineers etc.) think that wasting money 
for a Rolex is ridiculous. I don't even think that a Rolex looks good. I 
consider a Rolex a status symbol that is not worth its money because you can 
get better, cheaper, better looking (this is my personal opinion) for less 
money. 

Maybe you consider scientists and engineer not serious people, but I do and I 
know lots of serious people (by my definition) that consider all you mentioned 
above as waste of money.

And I don't buy that masterpieces made by our farthers cannot be improved. 
Imagine you build a real masterpiece carriage one hundred years ago when there 
were no cars. How many people would buy a carriage instead of an ordinary car 
today just because the carriage is a real masterpiece and an ordinary car is 
just an ordinary car?

The NeXTSTEP GUI was designed fifteen years ago when it was basically not 
possible to have round buttons, gradients, transparency, shadows etc. because 
the hardware was not powerful enough for that. But the world moved on and 
today almost nobody wants to have square buttons, no gradients etc. (There are 
certainly people today which would prefer to have a masterpiece carriage 
instead of an ordinary car, but most people that just need something to go to 
work would certainly take the car).

 Now of course, other people change dresses every few months, have a
 Swatch, use the latest perfume from Kiko or Pupa or whatever. They
 drink  some fashion-drink like bacardi breezer.

So what? People did not use cell-phones, GPS receivers, DVD burners,  1 TB 
hard drives etc. 20 years ago. Now they do. Is that a good thing or a bad?

The gnustep project is about 15 years old, older then both KDE and GNOME. How 
many developers does gnustep have today and how many does KDE (or GNOME) have?
Why are there so many people working on KDE and GNOME, but almost none working 
on Gnustep?

Looking at

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Gnustep.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7b/Gnome-2.28.png

I guess most people start a gnustep application exactly once. After that they 
probably stay with KDE or GNOME. Obviously there is a minority that prefers 
the NeXTSTEP look. And if it is the aim of gnustep to develop applications / a 
desktop for this minority, then there is nothing wrong with the direction the 
gnustep project is going. But if the gnustep projects wants to increase the 
number of users and developers, I think it is absolutely necessary to improve 
/ change the look and feel to something more familiar / pleasent for typical 
OSS users.

Greetings,
Michael


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

Hi,

 The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of
 glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with
 Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for
 us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring
 tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif.
 I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for
 more neutral looking ones.

I work for a company that develops software for the German Space Operation 
Center. They use Linux with KDE and Windows XP in all their control rooms. 

Why should something like Expose, window shadows or animations or transparancy 
make a user interface less useable? It can certainly make it less useable if 
overused, but it can also make it more useable when used at the right places.

 No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in
 my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for
 instance.

I doubt that this is a solution. I doubt it is possible to make KDE or GNOME 
look like Snow Leopard. There was the Baghira theme which did quite some 
hackish things but even with Baghira the look and feel of KDE was not really 
similar to MacOS X. I once created a style for Chameleon (a KDE3 plastik 
style). At that time it was bitmap based and I doubt that it is possible to 
create a style that even resembles Snow Leopard.

I don't say that gnustep should adopt Snow Leopard's Look  Feel. But I think 
gnustep should adopt a more modern default Look  Feel that is more familiar 
to people coming from Windows, KDE, Gnome or MacOS X.

  My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with
  Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical
  stuff in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target
  researchers with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them?
 
 No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is
 way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency.

NeXTSTEP was used at universities back in the 90's because it was way better 
then other systems. But the world changed, Windows / Linux with KDE or GNOME 
is good enough for people today. Developing applications with ObjC/gnustep 
might be easier / more convenient then developing applications with say 
C++/Qt, but it is not a fundamental improvement.

And back in the 90's Windows was not as dominant as it is today. Today most 
people are familar with the Windows GUI (even scientists  / researchers) and 
it is always hard to get used to something new. gnustep Look  Feel is 
radically different from what people are used and I guess most people prefer 
toolkits that enables them to write applications that has a Look  Feel people 
are used to.

 behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I
 think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming
 practices, and usually kills performance.

Yes. I have to code Java / .Net at work and I think GC is one of the things I 
like about Java and .Net. I know you can still have memory leaks, but GC 
allows me to think about the problem I want to solve without having to think 
about allocating / freeing memory all the time. Newever versions of the JVM 
include stack allocation and the garbage first collector, I don't think you'll 
have any performance problems with that.

Michael


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread icicle

I want to remind you all of a discussion on gnustep-ui which took place 
years ago:


http://jesseross.com/clients/gnustep/ui/concepts/01/ui.png

This is grey, too. But it still looks pretty :)

TOM


Zitat von Michael Thaler michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de:


Hi,


The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of
glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with
Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for
us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring
tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif.
I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for
more neutral looking ones.


I work for a company that develops software for the German Space Operation
Center. They use Linux with KDE and Windows XP in all their control rooms.

Why should something like Expose, window shadows or animations or 
transparancy

make a user interface less useable? It can certainly make it less useable if
overused, but it can also make it more useable when used at the right places.


No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in
my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for
instance.


I doubt that this is a solution. I doubt it is possible to make KDE or GNOME
look like Snow Leopard. There was the Baghira theme which did quite some
hackish things but even with Baghira the look and feel of KDE was not really
similar to MacOS X. I once created a style for Chameleon (a KDE3 plastik
style). At that time it was bitmap based and I doubt that it is possible to
create a style that even resembles Snow Leopard.

I don't say that gnustep should adopt Snow Leopard's Look  Feel. But I think
gnustep should adopt a more modern default Look  Feel that is more familiar
to people coming from Windows, KDE, Gnome or MacOS X.


 My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with
 Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical
 stuff in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target
 researchers with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them?

No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is
way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency.


NeXTSTEP was used at universities back in the 90's because it was way better
then other systems. But the world changed, Windows / Linux with KDE or GNOME
is good enough for people today. Developing applications with ObjC/gnustep
might be easier / more convenient then developing applications with say
C++/Qt, but it is not a fundamental improvement.

And back in the 90's Windows was not as dominant as it is today. Today most
people are familar with the Windows GUI (even scientists  / researchers) and
it is always hard to get used to something new. gnustep Look  Feel is
radically different from what people are used and I guess most people prefer
toolkits that enables them to write applications that has a Look  
Feel people

are used to.


behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I
think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming
practices, and usually kills performance.


Yes. I have to code Java / .Net at work and I think GC is one of the things I
like about Java and .Net. I know you can still have memory leaks, but GC
allows me to think about the problem I want to solve without having to think
about allocating / freeing memory all the time. Newever versions of the JVM
include stack allocation and the garbage first collector, I don't 
think you'll

have any performance problems with that.

Michael


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread David Chisnall


On 9 Oct 2009, at 21:29, Markus Hitter wrote:


Am 09.10.2009 um 20:23 schrieb David Chisnall:


On 9 Oct 2009, at 19:19, Gregory Casamento wrote:


Well, yeah... I do know about pbxbuild since I helped develop it.
The point is that the majority of mac devs expect things to be done
completely from the mac.


My point was that this is something we could automate pretty  
trivially.  I managed to get Darwine building (but not running)  
Windows versions of GNUstep apps, and it would be pretty simple to  
package up a virtual appliance that people could open with  
VirtualBox on their Mac and just point at an svn repository and get  
automated builds.  Same with Darwine; we could package up a .wine  
directory containing GNUstep with this.


Does this mean GNUstep cross-development can be done from within  
Xcode already or do you want to use Darwine to run ProjectCenter/ 
Gorm for development? For the later, I fear this isn't exactly what  
developers mean with completely on the Mac.


Currently, pbxbuild doesn't run under Darwine, so I had to generate  
the GNUmakefile by hand, but I did set up one project with an  
'external build system' step in XCode that ssh'd to a VM and ran  
pbxbuild there. It's not how I'd want to work, but it does work for  
producing Linux / *BSD binaries.  We could quite easily produce a  
VirtualBox appliance that had a small Linux / GNUstep install and a  
build script that can be used from XCode to rsync the project into the  
VM and then run pbxbuild on it.


An ability to run/debug GNUstep/Windows executables on the Mac would  
be a nice addition, though.


Unfortunately, for some reason, GNUstep/Windows apps didn't work at  
all in WINE for me.


David

-- Sent from my PDP-11



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

Hi,

 1. Marketing to get people to give us a look.

To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really dated?

Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-
bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613
  
BlackBox   1.6 %
GNOME   35.1 %
Enlightenment   3.8 %
Fluxbox   3.9 %
IceWM   3.2 %
KDE   37.7 %
WindowMaker   2.2 %
Xfce   9.8 %
Other (please email us)

I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market share 
of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux users 
prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and will 
be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state?

I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at 
work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer 
Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I 
think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort 
of ok.

But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a 
masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I 
want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the 
openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something 
using gnustep, the old-fashened Look  Feel kills my motivation because I 
think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am 
actually a former KDE developer).

 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out
 (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group
 of three or four good themes to appeal to different people)

For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does 
gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want 
to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case 
I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice 
API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep 
being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a 
Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop 
environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think 
gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to 
Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS 
X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look 
cute and appealing. 
 
 3. Enough good quality stuff so that people don't try once and then
 give up.

For this to happen, gnustep needs more developers. In my opinion the only way 
that this can happen is if more people start to use gnustep. Apparently 
gnustep did not attract a lot of users / developers for the last 15 years. So 
maybe it is time to change direction?

Greetings,
Michael


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Gregory Casamento

Micheal,

I couldn't have said it much better myself.

GNUstep's current look is good enough for some, but it's not inspiring
new membership.   I, personally, like the current look myself, but I
realize that many people are looking for something more modern.

This is why theming is so important.I would say that apps are of
equal significance in this equation.

GC

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Michael Thaler
michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote:
 Hi,

 1. Marketing to get people to give us a look.

 To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really dated?

 Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey:

 http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-
 bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613

 BlackBox   1.6 %
 GNOME   35.1 %
 Enlightenment   3.8 %
 Fluxbox   3.9 %
 IceWM   3.2 %
 KDE   37.7 %
 WindowMaker   2.2 %
 Xfce   9.8 %
 Other (please email us)

 I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market 
 share
 of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux users
 prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and will
 be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state?

 I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at
 work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer
 Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I
 think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort
 of ok.

 But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a
 masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I
 want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the
 openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something
 using gnustep, the old-fashened Look  Feel kills my motivation because I
 think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am
 actually a former KDE developer).

 2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out
 (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group
 of three or four good themes to appeal to different people)

 For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take. Does
 gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep want
 to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former case
 I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a nice
 API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep
 being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with a
 Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop
 environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't think
 gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to
 Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to MacOS
 X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look
 cute and appealing.

 3. Enough good quality stuff so that people don't try once and then
 give up.

 For this to happen, gnustep needs more developers. In my opinion the only way
 that this can happen is if more people start to use gnustep. Apparently
 gnustep did not attract a lot of users / developers for the last 15 years. So
 maybe it is time to change direction?

 Greetings,
 Michael


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-- 
Gregory Casamento
Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
## GNUstep Chief Maintainer
yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
(240)274-9630 (Cell), (301)362-9640 (Home)


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Stef Bidi

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Michael Thaler
michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote:

Hi,

1. Marketing to get people to give us a look.

To see what? A user interface that most people consider looking really
dated?

Here are some numbers from the 2006 Linux Deskop Survey:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-
bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-%0Abin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archiveid=0821200617613

BlackBox 1.6 %
GNOME 35.1 %
Enlightenment 3.8 %
Fluxbox 3.9 %
IceWM 3.2 %
KDE 37.7 %
WindowMaker 2.2 %
Xfce 9.8 %
Other (please email us)

I could not find any results for 2008 or 2009 but I doubt that the market
share
of WindowMaker increased. Don't you think that a huge majority of Linux
users
prefer a more modern looking desktop environment with some eye-candy and
will
be just dissapointed if the see gnustep in its current state?

I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at
work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer
Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I
think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look
sort
of ok.

But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it
is a
masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I
want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the
openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something
using gnustep, the old-fashened Look Feel kills my motivation because I
think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am
actually a former KDE developer).

I just completely disagree with your arguments here. So what if you like
eye-candy? Riccardo and Richard like the grey NeXT look, and using the
mailing list as the sample space I would say it's divided roughly 60/40 for
the NeXT look over the so called eye-candy.

Have anyone here using GTK or Qt applications ever actually built these from
scratch? I would assume no, because the idea of an easy install always
comes up. I've personally next built Qt, but have done GTK. Simple put,
it's hell! You have 15 dependencies you need to satisfy before GTK even
configures without an error, and another 10 dependencies to get decent
support for everything you want (
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/gtk2.html everything in
Required + their dependencies). Then, after you're all done with that you
still end up with a dull and grey look... so you go out and install the
clearlooks theme engine. How is that any easier than building GNUstep? I
can truthly say, it's not. I still say we need distribution support, which
the little that we do have we seem to be loosing. How do we get their
support? Marketing will become much easier if all we need to say is do
apt-get install gnustep-core gworkspace instead of grab the sources from
svn and compile.

To be honest, I don't like WindowMaker. don't like using and think those
icons are a waste of my precious screen space. What I'll generally try to
do is use nothing but GNUstep applications with no window manager (since
GNUstep supports it, even though it has issues).

On top of all that, GNUstep has a serious identity crisis. It's such a far
departure from the usual Gnome/KDE/Windows desktop metaphore. So you end up
with the problem that most people expect you provide at least a half working
desktop in order to feel comfortable, but that's not GNUstep's goal, it's
just a development environment. You can see that littered all over
Michael's post, he's trying to compare GNUstep with KDE and Gnome instead of
with Qt and GTK (+ GLib and GDK). Etoile is definitly working to bridge
that gap, but even so it's not easy to get it. I personally do not build
all of Etoile because it's just simply too much work. I would not use Gnome
if I had to build it everytime either.

2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out
(changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group
of three or four good themes to appeal to different people)

For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take.
Does
gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep
want
to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former
case
I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a
nice
API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep
being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with
a
Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop
environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't
think
gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to
Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to
MacOS
X. A simple theme will

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Gregory Casamento

Stef,

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Stef Bidi stefanb...@gmail.com wrote:
snip


 But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it
 is a
 masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I
 want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the
 openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something
 using gnustep, the old-fashened Look  Feel kills my motivation because I
 think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am
 actually a former KDE developer).

 I just completely disagree with your arguments here.  So what if you like
 eye-candy?  Riccardo and Richard like the grey NeXT look, and using the
 mailing list as the sample space I would say it's divided roughly 60/40 for
 the NeXT look over the so called eye-candy.

The problem is that the current look does not inspire new developers
to keep working on GNUstep apps because the look is very spartan and
old fashioned.   Looks do matter to some people (perhaps more than
they should, in my opinion).

 Have anyone here using GTK or Qt applications ever actually built these from
 scratch?  I would assume no, because the idea of an easy install always
 comes up.  I've personally next built Qt, but have done GTK.  Simple put,
 it's hell!  You have 15 dependencies you need to satisfy before GTK even
 configures without an error, and another 10 dependencies to get decent
 support for everything you want
 (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/gtk2.html everything in
 Required + their dependencies).  Then, after you're all done with that you
 still end up with a dull and grey look... so you go out and install the
 clearlooks theme engine.  How is that any easier than building GNUstep?  I
 can truthly say, it's not.  I still say we need distribution support, which
 the little that we do have we seem to be loosing.  How do we get their
 support?  Marketing will become much easier if all we need to say is do
 apt-get install gnustep-core gworkspace instead of grab the sources from
 svn and compile.

Indeed.  Part of the problem, though, is some distributions stick to
the FHS as if it's gospel.   On Debian they put our stuff into the
weirdest places so that GNUstep will conform to the standard.
Also, they (Debian) tend to have VERY old packages for GNUstep which
gives a bad impression of our stuff.

 To be honest, I don't like WindowMaker.  don't like using and think those
 icons are a waste of my precious screen space.  What I'll generally try to
 do is use nothing but GNUstep applications with no window manager (since
 GNUstep supports it, even though it has issues).

Indeed.  What I would like to see is better integration between
GNUstep and other Window Managers including GNOME and KDE.   I would
also like to see the new window manager from Etoile.

 On top of all that, GNUstep has a serious identity crisis.  It's such a far
 departure from the usual Gnome/KDE/Windows desktop metaphore.  So you end up
 with the problem that most people expect you provide at least a half working
 desktop in order to feel comfortable, but that's not GNUstep's goal, it's
 just a development environment.  You can see that littered all over
 Michael's post, he's trying to compare GNUstep with KDE and Gnome instead of
 with Qt and GTK (+ GLib and GDK).  Etoile is definitly working to bridge
 that gap, but even so it's not easy to get it.  I personally do not build
 all of Etoile because it's just simply too much work.  I would not use Gnome
 if I had to build it everytime either.

GNUstep does have an identity crisis.   By collaborating with Etoile
I'm hoping to deal with that.   GNUstep is to Etoile what GTK is to
GNOME.   We are the framework on which they build.   We provide the
fundamental support structure.

  2. Eye-candy to draw people in and get them to try things out
  (changing the default theme won't do that ... we need to have a group
  of three or four good themes to appeal to different people)

 For me, the fundametal question is what direction gnustep wants to take.
 Does
 gnustep want to appeal to former NeXTSTEP/Openstep users? Or does gnustep
 want
 to be a MacOS X for Linux and other OSS operating systems? In the former
 case
 I am not really interested in gnustep. Openstep/gnustep might provide a
 nice
 API, maybe it is even a bit nicer then Qt, but I don't really see gnustep
 being adopted widely if it just tries to provide an Openstep-like API with
 a
 Nextstep-like inteface. If gnustep aims to provide APIs and a desktop
 environement similar to MacOS X I would be very interested. But I don't
 think
 gnustep can do both. Either it will continue to try something similar to
 Openstep or it will change direction and try to be something similar to
 MacOS
 X. A simple theme will not be enough to make a gnustep desktop really look
 cute and appealing.

 Again with the eye-candy.  GNUstep doesn't need to be providing this by
 default, and no

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

Hi,

 I just completely disagree with your arguments here.  So what if you like
 eye-candy?  Riccardo and Richard like the grey NeXT look, and using the
 mailing list as the sample space I would say it's divided roughly 60/40 for
 the NeXT look over the so called eye-candy.

My point is not that I like eye-candy (I actually do not like too much eye-
candy). My point is that apparently the majority of people like a more modern 
look for their desktop enivornements.

Here are some numbers for the usage share of desktop environements:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems

The market share of Windows is roughly 93%, Mac OS X is roughly 4.5% and Linux 
roughly 1%. Other  operating systems are about 2%. On Linux most people use 
either KDE or Gnome. So basically 98% of all desktop operating systems used 
have desktops that provide quite some eye-candy in their default 
configurations.

Obviously some people change their themes to reduce the amount of eye-candy 
(others probably chose themes that offer even more eye-candy). But most people 
seem to be quite happy with their desktops otherwise Microsoft, Apple, KDE and 
Gnome would probably chose different themes / defaults.

On the other hand,Gnustep applications feature a more conservative grey Next 
look. Gnustep did not manage to attract many users / developers compared to 
KDE / Gnome even so they had a head start.

Certainly it is oversimplified to say that is just because of the Look  Feel. 
But don't you think that the old-fashined Next Look is at least part of the 
problem?

 Have anyone here using GTK or Qt applications ever actually built these
  from scratch?  I would assume no, because the idea of an easy install
  always comes up.  I've personally next built Qt, but have done GTK. 

As a former KDE developer I have installed Qt / KDE from scratch. I didn't 
have any major problems doing it.

  Simple put, it's hell!  You have 15 dependencies you need to satisfy
  before GTK even configures without an error, and another 10 dependencies
  to get decent support for everything you want (
 http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/x/gtk2.html everything in
 Required + their dependencies).  Then, after you're all done with that
  you still end up with a dull and grey look... so you go out and install
  the clearlooks theme engine.  How is that any easier than building
  GNUstep?  I can truthly say, it's not.  I still say we need distribution

Building KDE and Gnome is probably not easier then building gnustep. But most 
people do not have to do that, they just install the packages provided by 
their distros. And even as a KDE developer, you usually do not have to compile 
Qt yourself, just install libs + headers provided by your distro.

 On top of all that, GNUstep has a serious identity crisis.  It's such a far
 departure from the usual Gnome/KDE/Windows desktop metaphore.  So you end
  up with the problem that most people expect you provide at least a half
  working desktop in order to feel comfortable, but that's not GNUstep's
  goal, it's just a development environment.  You can see that littered all

And that is exactly the problem. GNUstep's goal is to provide a development 
environment, but the applications developed with it look foreign and out of 
place in KDE / Gnome and Windows. I don't know about MacOS X, but on MacOS X 
most people will probably use Cocoa anyway.

In my opinion GNUstep as a development environment was/is a failure because it 
did not attract many developers / users.I don't see this changing by just 
improving gnustep-base or gnustep-gui.  I think the only way to change this is 
to change the direction of the project.

  over Michael's post, he's trying to compare GNUstep with KDE and Gnome
  instead of with Qt and GTK (+ GLib and GDK).  Etoile is definitly working
  to bridge that gap, but even so it's not easy to get it.  I personally do
  not build all of Etoile because it's just simply too much work.  I would
  not use Gnome if I had to build it everytime either.

Most people do not have to build their desktop environments. They don't care 
how many dependencies KDE or GNOME has and how difficult it is to build them. 
If 
I want to write a cool new application for KDE, I just install KDE, all 
necessary headers and start developing my application. The exception are core 
developers that work on deskop components, but even they do not have to 
rebuild the whole desktop all the time.

 Here I agree with one of the messages that was posted before on this
 thread.  GNUstep needs to stop chasing butterflies.  GNUstep barely has
  full 10.3 compatibility, yet there already are 10.5 features in.  In my
  opinion, and that's all it is since there's not much I can do to help in
  this aspect, GNUstep needs to focus on finishing full compability with one
  version of OS X before moving to the next.  Pick one, and stick with it
  until you're at least 90% finished before moving to the next.  I'm

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Jamie Ramone

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Michael Thaler
michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote:
 Hi,

 The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of
 glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with
 Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for
 us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring
 tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif.
 I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for
 more neutral looking ones.

 I work for a company that develops software for the German Space Operation
 Center. They use Linux with KDE and Windows XP in all their control rooms.

 Why should something like Expose, window shadows or animations or transparancy
 make a user interface less useable? It can certainly make it less useable if
 overused, but it can also make it more useable when used at the right places.

 No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in
 my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for
 instance.

 I doubt that this is a solution. I doubt it is possible to make KDE or GNOME
 look like Snow Leopard. There was the Baghira theme which did quite some
 hackish things but even with Baghira the look and feel of KDE was not really
 similar to MacOS X. I once created a style for Chameleon (a KDE3 plastik
 style). At that time it was bitmap based and I doubt that it is possible to
 create a style that even resembles Snow Leopard.

 I don't say that gnustep should adopt Snow Leopard's Look  Feel. But I think
 gnustep should adopt a more modern default Look  Feel that is more familiar
 to people coming from Windows, KDE, Gnome or MacOS X.

  My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with
  Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical
  stuff in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target
  researchers with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them?

 No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is
 way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency.

 NeXTSTEP was used at universities back in the 90's because it was way better
 then other systems. But the world changed, Windows / Linux with KDE or GNOME
 is good enough for people today. Developing applications with ObjC/gnustep
 might be easier / more convenient then developing applications with say
 C++/Qt, but it is not a fundamental improvement.

Except I wasn't talking about code development with objc, I was
talking about making apps that are far more usable without necessarily
doing much more work to achieve this goal. The fact that those other
systems you mentioned are good enough is because people don't know
any better. They don't  have as much information on alternative GUIs.
Apple's is known, but not well known. And both Gnome and KDE are
basically Windows clones (interface-wise)

 And back in the 90's Windows was not as dominant as it is today. Today most
 people are familar with the Windows GUI (even scientists  / researchers) and
 it is always hard to get used to something new. gnustep Look  Feel is
 radically different from what people are used and I guess most people prefer
 toolkits that enables them to write applications that has a Look  Feel people
 are used to.

This is bullshit. The fact that the world has changed and new things
are hard to get out the door is just your own point of view. Getting
people to embrace a new concept as GNUstep just depends on how you
do it and how much work you're willing to put into it. That being
said, The whole NeXT interface was built to be as usable as possible,
and one of it's well known advantages is that it's easy to learn.

 behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I
 think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming
 practices, and usually kills performance.

 Yes. I have to code Java / .Net at work and I think GC is one of the things I
 like about Java and .Net. I know you can still have memory leaks, but GC
 allows me to think about the problem I want to solve without having to think
 about allocating / freeing memory all the time. Newever versions of the JVM
 include stack allocation and the garbage first collector, I don't think you'll
 have any performance problems with that.

 Michael


I don't use Java or .NET, but the one person I know who uses Java
hates it for lousy performance. And as much as a holy grail as it
seems GC is still wrong for objc (even if it fits well with Java)
because it has no primitive to dynamically allocate blocks of memory
in the first place, it's done through standard library calls. If
you're going to have an automatic deallocation mechanism, then you
should have an automatic allocation one as well.
-- 
Besos, abrazos, confeti y aplausos.
Jamie Ramone
El Vikingo


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

Hi,

 Except I wasn't talking about code development with objc, I was
 talking about making apps that are far more usable without necessarily
 doing much more work to achieve this goal. The fact that those other

First of all, applications written by scientists / researchers are usually not 
written to be useable, but to solve a specific problem. Second, useable is 
quite subjective. I doubt that a GNUstep application is more useable for 
anyone having 10 years of experience with Windows-like user interfaces.

 systems you mentioned are good enough is because people don't know
 any better. They don't  have as much information on alternative GUIs.
 Apple's is known, but not well known. And both Gnome and KDE are
 basically Windows clones (interface-wise)

Sorry, I really detest this elitist view. Do you have any case studies that 
Nextstep/Openstep is more useable then say Snow Leopard. I doubt it.

 This is bullshit. The fact that the world has changed and new things
 are hard to get out the door is just your own point of view. Getting
 people to embrace a new concept as GNUstep just depends on how you
 do it and how much work you're willing to put into it. That being
 said, The whole NeXT interface was built to be as usable as possible,
 and one of it's well known advantages is that it's easy to learn.

Well, I am quite sure people at Microsoft will tell you the Windows interface 
was build to be as useable as possible. If you ask someone at Apple they will 
tell you there user interface is designed to be useable and the GNOME people 
will tell you all about their great usability even if you don't ask them.

And if you think it is bullshit that it is hard to get new things out of the 
door, why did GNUstep not attract users / developers? Why are about 98% of the 
desktop systems worldwide 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems) using 
a Windows-like user interface?

 I don't use Java or .NET, but the one person I know who uses Java
 hates it for lousy performance. And as much as a holy grail as it

Have a look at 
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=alllang=allbox=1. 
I know this is not a realistic benchmark, but Java is not as bad as people 
(espacially people that never used Java) claim.

I guess, it is probably best for me to stay with KDE and MacOS X because I 
don't share this elitist attitude that Nextstep/Openstep is the best GUI and 
people just don't use it because they don't know it. I for one know 
Nextstep/Openstep, I even have an old Gecko with Nextstep but I still prefer 
something more modern looking. KDE seems more user oriented. From my 
experience they want to create something the user wants to use and not 
something they think the user has to use to increase productivity. In my 
opinion OSS products should be fun to work on / with. But I am fine with your 
attitude as well, as long as you don't force it on me.

Michael


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Jamie Ramone

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Michael Thaler
michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote:
 Hi,

 Except I wasn't talking about code development with objc, I was
 talking about making apps that are far more usable without necessarily
 doing much more work to achieve this goal. The fact that those other

 First of all, applications written by scientists / researchers are usually not
 written to be useable, but to solve a specific problem. Second, useable is
 quite subjective. I doubt that a GNUstep application is more useable for
 anyone having 10 years of experience with Windows-like user interfaces.

I didn't say anything about scientists, but users in general. And
usability may be subjective, but not that much. Just google Jakob
Nielsen. Interface engineering exists since Macintosh does.

 systems you mentioned are good enough is because people don't know
 any better. They don't  have as much information on alternative GUIs.
 Apple's is known, but not well known. And both Gnome and KDE are
 basically Windows clones (interface-wise)

 Sorry, I really detest this elitist view. Do you have any case studies that
 Nextstep/Openstep is more useable then say Snow Leopard. I doubt it.

I wasn't being elitist, just pointing out a fact: not many people know
alternative GUIs. This comes from Windows having such a large portion
of the desktop market. And Those who use a GNU/Linux system usually
have a KDE or Gnome interface which look remarkably like Windows. Thus
people seem to be accustom to that type of interface because that's
all they really know.

 This is bullshit. The fact that the world has changed and new things
 are hard to get out the door is just your own point of view. Getting
 people to embrace a new concept as GNUstep just depends on how you
 do it and how much work you're willing to put into it. That being
 said, The whole NeXT interface was built to be as usable as possible,
 and one of it's well known advantages is that it's easy to learn.

 Well, I am quite sure people at Microsoft will tell you the Windows interface
 was build to be as useable as possible. If you ask someone at Apple they will
 tell you there user interface is designed to be useable and the GNOME people
 will tell you all about their great usability even if you don't ask them.

Get real, Windows was built to compete with Macintosh. GNOME wasn't
BUILT to be as usable as possible, but has improved over the years. Of
all the desktops out there, Apple is the only one that actually does
usability research, just about everyone else works on assumptions.

 And if you think it is bullshit that it is hard to get new things out of the
 door, why did GNUstep not attract users / developers? Why are about 98% of the
 desktop systems worldwide
 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_desktop_operating_systems) using
 a Windows-like user interface?

Because, like I said, it depends greatly on how you present your work
and how much work you put into marketing it. This topic pops up over
and over again, but no big effort has come out of this.

 I don't use Java or .NET, but the one person I know who uses Java
 hates it for lousy performance. And as much as a holy grail as it

 Have a look at
 http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=alllang=allbox=1.
 I know this is not a realistic benchmark, but Java is not as bad as people
 (espacially people that never used Java) claim.

 I guess, it is probably best for me to stay with KDE and MacOS X because I
 don't share this elitist attitude that Nextstep/Openstep is the best GUI and
 people just don't use it because they don't know it. I for one know
 Nextstep/Openstep, I even have an old Gecko with Nextstep but I still prefer
 something more modern looking. KDE seems more user oriented. From my
 experience they want to create something the user wants to use and not
 something they think the user has to use to increase productivity. In my
 opinion OSS products should be fun to work on / with. But I am fine with your
 attitude as well, as long as you don't force it on me.

Which I wasn't. I wasn't being elitist either (read above). I still
stand by my claim: once enough people are made aware of GNUstep some
will choose it, some won't, but it won't be automatically rejected on
grounds of being out of fashion or hard to use or too different
from Windows or any of the usual excuses used by some to dismiss it.
And let's be fair, no one in the GNUstep community is ever elitist
(zealous maybe). Have you ever heard complaints from software
developers about the Mac crowd? You'd think they're all primadonnas
who feel they're entitled to to the best software there is by virtue
of being a Mac user. I've never encountered that with GNUsteppers so
far. So if you want to stay with Mac, go ahead. If you want to go with
GNUstep you're welcome in the community.

Not to get back to the previous argument but...ahem: I, for one.
Remember, NeXT never achieved a significant market share so quite

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Germán Arias


I think this discussion is out of his goal. We could discuss days about
what is better, and we will not reach an agreement. Everyone will have
their opinions and will always be differences. I think the goal is to
work together on short-term goals, so the only thing needed is to
determine those objectives. I think these are: 

1) Improving the website: With sections for new users, advanced users,
screenshots with different themes and different desktops (especially
GNOME and KDE) and how to obtain these themes or install these
(including Camaelon). And information for users and packagers. Also
screenshots of apps running on other desktops.

2) More documents for new users, which we assume do not know Cocoa. (We
need users in other environments) 

3) Themes: Well, there are currently people working on it. 
 
4) Improve Project Center 

Of course there are other long-term goals. But I think the above are the
main short term. 




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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

Hi,

first of all I am sorry that I spammed the list. Apparently I have a strong 
opinion about the matter, but I might have offended people that work hard on 
GNUstep and it might have been better to just shut up because my opinion 
doesn't really matter anyway because I never contributed anything to GNUstep 
(well, I once started creating a KDE style for Cameleon, but I never finished 
it and I can't remember if I actually made it publicly available). So this 
will be the last mail on this subject from me.

 I didn't say anything about scientists, but users in general. And
 usability may be subjective, but not that much. Just google Jakob
 Nielsen. Interface engineering exists since Macintosh does.

The original poster did.

 I wasn't being elitist, just pointing out a fact: not many people know
 alternative GUIs. This comes from Windows having such a large portion

Are you sure? At least most people my age probably used something like GEOS, 
the Amiga Workbench, GEM on the Atari ST, RISC OS desktop, CDE, BeOS or 
something else. At least I did use some of them including NeXTSTEP. But 
apparently most people seem to be happy with Windows-like interfaces nowadays, 
otherwise there would be more alternate desktop environments, especially on 
Linux and other open source operating systems.

 Get real, Windows was built to compete with Macintosh. GNOME wasn't
 BUILT to be as usable as possible, but has improved over the years. Of
 all the desktops out there, Apple is the only one that actually does
 usability research, just about everyone else works on assumptions.

That is definitivly not true, Here is are some links to GNOME usability 
studies:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/report_main.html
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/usertesting.html

There is also a GNOME usability project:
http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject

Here is a Microsoft usability report:
http://www.microsoft.com/Usability/default.mspx

Here is a link to the Microsoft user research page: 
http://www.microsoft.com/userresearch/default.mspx


 Because, like I said, it depends greatly on how you present your work
 and how much work you put into marketing it. This topic pops up over
 and over again, but no big effort has come out of this.

GNUstep had fifteen years to present GNUstep as a development environment to 
developers / users. There have been articles in linux magazines, there have 
been articles on slashdot / osnews and other major software news websites.
In my opinion GNUstep as a software development environment failed because it 
did not attract many developers / users.I don't think marketing will solve 
this because in my opinion it is basically useless to develop applications 
using the GNUstep development environment because they do not integrate with 
KDE nor GNOME nor Windows and there is no real GNUstep desktop environment 
(but I am quite happy about Etoile). I don't think marketing will change any 
of that. I think the only way to change that is to change the direction of the 
project (but as I said above, this is my personal opinion and I do not want to 
force it on anybody. If people prefer GNUstep the way it is, it is fine with 
me, there are enough alternatives).

 Which I wasn't. I wasn't being elitist either (read above). I still
 stand by my claim: once enough people are made aware of GNUstep some
 will choose it, some won't, but it won't be automatically rejected on
 grounds of being out of fashion or hard to use or too different
 from Windows or any of the usual excuses used by some to dismiss it.

Maybe your claim that once enough people are made aware of GNUstep some will 
choose it is flawed? GNUstep is there for about fifteen years, but apparently 
most people seem to prefer KDE or GNOME, even open source developers who read 
slashdot and OSNews and almost certainly heard about GNUstep (I remember some 
stories about GNUstep on slashdot and OSNews). Also the advent of MacOS X did 
not really help GNUstep (as far as I know). I know a lot of Linux users who 
like open source and own MacBooks (including me). Wouldn't it be natural for 
them to use gnustep which is quite similar to Cocoa? If they don't use it, 
wouldn't it be interesting why they don't use it, even so it seems a natural 
fit. I, for one, like the Openstep / GNUstep / Cocoa API but I do not like how 
GNUstep applications look and that GNUstep applications do not integrate with 
any existing desktop on Linux and that there is no GNUstep desktop 
environment. Do you think it is farfetched that I am not the only one who 
thinks like this?

 Not to get back to the previous argument but...ahem: I, for one.
 Remember, NeXT never achieved a significant market share so quite
 naturally, not many people know about it.

Well, Windows did and in this respect Microsoft did much better then NeXT (and 
Apple and all the others). Windows is far from the best desktop environment, 
but apparently it was good enough for most people,

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Riccardo Mottola


Hi,


I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing I did at 
work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic mode because I prefer 
Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look compared to Aero. On the other hand, I 
think Snow Leopard looks quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort 
of ok.


But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't care if it is a 
masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it in a frame on the wall, I 
want to use it as a desktop environment). I really like ObjC and the 
openstep/gnustep/Cocoa APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something 
using gnustep, the old-fashened Look  Feel kills my motivation because I 
think nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am 
actually a former KDE developer).
  
Well, what you write here actually proves my point. The first thing I do 
on XP or Vista is to reset to Windows classic. Windows classic is then - 
barring the icons of XP or Vista - pretty much like WIndows 2000 indeed. 
And the controls, widgets, buttons are those of NT4 or 95/98.


But guess what? In my opinion Microsoft really copied the NeXT look and 
adapted it to the Windows 3.1 style. I can tell you since I develop the 
WinClassic theme. SOmetimes i have difficulties recognizing if I themend 
an Item or not or int he images folder the images really look close 
together. SUre there are differences, there are different controls, but 
that is not the point.


If you swithc back to classic, you are essentially stating you like the 
old look you despise.


THe difference is in many details of polish, different fonts and 
especially more uniform Icons.
Also, you notice the incompleteness of several applications. When 
Applications have a more complete feature-set, are well implemented (I 
think of Gorm or GNUMail for example) everything is better.


Riccardo


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Riccardo Mottola


Hi,
In my opinion GNUstep has to stop this it's just a development environment 
thing and develop a desktop environment where GNUstep applications do not look 
totaly out of place. GNUstep probably can't compete with KDE or GNOME but why 
shouldn't it be possible to compete with something like XFCE or Equinox or one 
of the other smaller OSS desktop environments. I think GNUstep needs to be 
more attractive to KDE / GNOME / MacOS X. In my opinion these are the people 
most likely to use GNUstep and if GNUstep attracts more users it will 
automatically get more developers.


  
Well, although I would not write that, I think it is about correct. I 
got angry and almost livid when Gregory started pointing out that.


We are a development environment. And a good one. But we are not just 
that.


On the other hand, GNUstep is not a Desktop Environment (I like it to 
call it a Workspace). It should never be. Other projects can fill that 
gap building up on GNUstep. Not by a total change the GNUstep 
Application Project shortens to GAP.


As you compare GTK and GNOME or GTK and XCFEl, that is gnustep. GNUstep 
is a bit more than just GTK, it has also the developer tools and some 
reference applications like SystemPreferences and GWorkspace, which are 
totally optional!


SO you can use GNUstep with Etoile and get complete Desktop Environment.

On the other hand, GAP tries about the same. But since some applications 
like the windowmanager exist (WindowMaker) it leverages on them (also to 
retain easy compatibility with other X11 apps you currently use a lot 
but will always, in a lesser degree, need to use: be it a Browser, an 
Office Suite or just Skye).


GNUstep + Windowmaker + GAP

I do not exactly, other people can stand up, but the Backbone project 
has about the same idea.


Of course each project has different philosphies, exaclty like XFce is 
different from GNOME.  It also means that you can run a standard GNustep 
applicaiton inside Etoile.


Riccardo


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Truls Becken

Michael Thaler wrote:

 GNUstep had fifteen years to present GNUstep as a development environment to
 developers / users. There have been articles in linux magazines, there have
 been articles on slashdot / osnews and other major software news websites.
 In my opinion GNUstep as a software development environment failed because it
 did not attract many developers / users.I don't think marketing will solve
 this because in my opinion it is basically useless to develop applications
 using the GNUstep development environment because they do not integrate with
 KDE nor GNOME nor Windows and there is no real GNUstep desktop environment
 (but I am quite happy about Etoile). I don't think marketing will change any
 of that. I think the only way to change that is to change the direction of the
 project (but as I said above, this is my personal opinion and I do not want to
 force it on anybody. If people prefer GNUstep the way it is, it is fine with
 me, there are enough alternatives).

I think you are definitely right in that what keeps developers from
choosing GNUstep for their work is that applications do not integrate
well with other desktop environments. This is not news, however, and
I'm not sure what you mean by changing the direction of the project.
What should be done besides the things Gregory listed in his 2007
visions, and backed up as still valid for 2009?

http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2006/12/plans-for-change.html
http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2008/12/gnustep-in-year-2009-look-back-and-look.html

-Truls


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Eric Wasylishen

In my opinion GNUstep has to stop this it's just a development  
environment thing and develop a desktop environment where GNUstep  
applications do not look totaly out of place. GNUstep probably  
can't compete with KDE or GNOME but why shouldn't it be possible to  
compete with something like XFCE or Equinox or one of the other  
smaller OSS desktop environments. I think GNUstep needs to be more  
attractive to KDE / GNOME / MacOS X. In my opinion these are the  
people most likely to use GNUstep and if GNUstep attracts more  
users it will automatically get more developers.


Well, although I would not write that, I think it is about correct.  
I got angry and almost livid when Gregory started pointing out that.


We are a development environment. And a good one. But we are not  
just that.


On the other hand, GNUstep is not a Desktop Environment (I like it  
to call it a Workspace). It should never be. Other projects can fill  
that gap building up on GNUstep. Not by a total change the GNUstep  
Application Project shortens to GAP.


As you compare GTK and GNOME or GTK and XCFEl, that is gnustep.  
GNUstep is a bit more than just GTK, it has also the developer tools  
and some reference applications like SystemPreferences and  
GWorkspace, which are totally optional!


SO you can use GNUstep with Etoile and get complete Desktop  
Environment.


On the other hand, GAP tries about the same. But since some  
applications like the windowmanager exist (WindowMaker) it leverages  
on them (also to retain easy compatibility with other X11 apps you  
currently use a lot but will always, in a lesser degree, need to  
use: be it a Browser, an Office Suite or just Skye).


GNUstep + Windowmaker + GAP

I do not exactly, other people can stand up, but the Backbone  
project has about the same idea.


Of course each project has different philosphies, exaclty like XFce  
is different from GNOME.  It also means that you can run a standard  
GNustep applicaiton inside Etoile.


Riccardo



If I could draw one conclusion on behalf of this thread, it is that  
GNUstep would really benefit from a second, less radical, desktop  
environment besides Etoile. A project that integrates GWorkspace,  
WindowMaker, and GAP applications and says We're a polished GNUstep- 
based desktop!, and can be installed with a single package yielding a  
desktop users can choose in their login screen.


I tried setting up such an environment myself on an Ubuntu 9.10 beta  
VM image last week, installing GWorkspace, WindowMaker, and a handful  
of GNUstep applications.


The problem was that I had to set up the environment myself.  
WindowMaker was installed as a desktop choice, but I had to manually  
start GWorkspace. By default, (I believe Zhang Weiwu also mentioned  
this a few months ago) you get two docks - one from WindowMaker and  
one from GWorkspace. I couldn't find a way of launching applications  
other than using the Run command in GWorkspace.


I am focused on Etoile, but would still love to see someone start this  
kind of project, whether it involves continuing Backbone, expanding  
GAP in to a desktop, or choosing a new project name. In any case, I  
think it would be healthy for the whole GNUstep community.


Cheers,
Eric


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-10 Thread Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf



Am 11.10.2009 um 00:51 schrieb Riccardo Mottola:


Hi,


I don't really like too much eye-candy personally. The first thing  
I did at work was to change Windows Vista from Aero to Classic  
mode because I prefer Windows Classic (Windows 2000?) look  
compared to Aero. On the other hand, I think Snow Leopard looks  
quite good and I also think KDE4 and Gnome look sort of ok.


But the NEXTSTEP look is too old-fashened even for me (I don't  
care if it is a masterpiece. I don't want to put a picture of it  
in a frame on the wall, I want to use it as a desktop  
environment). I really like ObjC and the openstep/gnustep/Cocoa  
APIs. But everytime I sit down to develop something using gnustep,  
the old-fashened Look  Feel kills my motivation because I think  
nobody will use it anyway and I decide to use Qt/KDE instead (I am  
actually a former KDE developer).


Well, what you write here actually proves my point. The first thing  
I do on XP or Vista is to reset to Windows classic. Windows classic  
is then - barring the icons of XP or Vista - pretty much like  
WIndows 2000 indeed. And the controls, widgets, buttons are those  
of NT4 or 95/98.


But guess what? In my opinion Microsoft really copied the NeXT look  
and adapted it to the Windows 3.1 style. I can tell you since I  
develop the WinClassic theme. SOmetimes i have difficulties  
recognizing if I themend an Item or not or int he images folder the  
images really look close together. SUre there are differences,  
there are different controls, but that is not the point.


If you swithc back to classic, you are essentially stating you like  
the old look you despise.




Riccardo, nobody is going to take away the classic OPENSTEP look from  
you. It will always be there as a theme - even if this will not be  
the default one. On the other hand I don't understand your lobbying  
for the classic look. People have their own taste, you can't force  
something onto them - you yourself strongly preferring the classic  
look should know this best. Arguments don't help here, taste is not  
something to discuss as they say (Über Geschmack lässt sich nicht  
streiten in german). And in our case a discussion about a default  
theme has no point since GNUstep aims to be a development environment  
as you state yourself:



Hi,
In my opinion GNUstep has to stop this it's just a development  
environment thing and develop a desktop environment where GNUstep  
applications do not look totaly out of place. GNUstep probably  
can't compete with KDE or GNOME but why shouldn't it be possible  
to compete with something like XFCE or Equinox or one of the other  
smaller OSS desktop environments. I think GNUstep needs to be more  
attractive to KDE / GNOME / MacOS X. In my opinion these are the  
people most likely to use GNUstep and if GNUstep attracts more  
users it will automatically get more developers.



Well, although I would not write that, I think it is about correct.  
I got angry and almost livid when Gregory started pointing out that.


We are a development environment. And a good one. But we are not  
just that.


On the other hand, GNUstep is not a Desktop Environment (I like it  
to call it a Workspace). It should never be. Other projects can  
fill that gap building up on GNUstep. Not by a total change the  
GNUstep Application Project shortens to GAP.




And if we are a development environment our goal is to help  
developers to create their applications. Those applications could  
then run in any context, just as the developers of that application  
envisions. This naturally leads to themability. Developers naturally  
want their applications to fit in. If you don't believe this look at  
Qt. They developed themes that fit in on all platforms they support  
(even if this is not by any means perfect). Themability is a must for  
a self respecting development environment nowadays. So we need GNOME,  
KDE and Windows themes. Just to be able to fit in there.


regards,

Lars

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Nicola Pero




Additionally I really dislike the coding style, not because it's not
mine, but because it fails to make the code more readable. On the
other hand, there was code by Fred which looked really ok, so maybe
it's just about using the coding style in a sane way All I
wanted to say is, that it's not that easy to start hacking inside
the GNUstep core libraries.


Completely agree.  Good coding conventions are picked because they
make things that are wrong look wrong or generate compiler errors /
warnings.  The GNU coding conventions were picked by selecting at
random various bits from all existing coding conventions in the hope
that that would make everyone happy.  They are a horrible mash of
things.  The indenting style is horrible, for example, and only works
if you have your editor set up in exactly the same way as RMS;
mixing  tabs and spaces for indenting is one of the most stupid ideas
I've  ever seen.  The convention of putting a space after function
names and  before the open bracket makes code harder to read because
it makes it  difficult to tell without reading the context that
something is an  argument list rather than a subexpression.  In fact,
almost everything  about the GNU coding conventions looks painfully
stupid to anyone with  a basic understanding of how the human visual
system works, but as an  official GNU project we are stuck with it.


I didn't know you have to stick to the GNU coding guidelines if you  
are

an official GNU project. Now I understand all the people complaining
about gcc being unreadable...


Just to clarify for the non-developers, GCC being unreadable is a  
completely different problem,

not particularly due to the coding style. ;-)

Having a standard coding style for the whole GNUstep project is really  
important as it makes
it easier to copy/move code from one part of the project to the  
other.  Using a standard coding
style that is documented and used by many other projects is also good  
as contributors will

be immediately familiar with it.

The GNU coding standards are used by a large number of projects with a  
lot of contributors
and popularity so can't really be blamed if GNUstep is less popular  
than, say, GIMP (which also
happens to follow the GNU coding standards) or any of the other  
million projects that use the

GNU coding standards or some variants of them.

While I sympathize with David who prefers (or is used) to some other  
coding style,
the GNUstep project needs a consistent coding style and the GNU coding  
standard
are as good a choice as any.  Since GNUstep is a GNU project, it's a  
natural choice.


By the way the GNU coding standards are not bad, in fact I personally  
like them (mostly because
my eyesight is really bad and whitespace is much more effective at  
separating tokens than
brackets or commas).  There are some details I'd change, but they  
certainly are not an unusual

or weird choice for a large free software project.

If it's a burning issue for many developers, I guess changing the  
coding style to something else
could be discussed.  There would be *lots* of reformatting to do if we  
ever reach an agreement

on some other coding style. ;-)

Thanks


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Sergii Stoian


Hi, Gregory. Hi, guys.

I can't resist expressing my opinion on GNUstep changes as I see it.

I've defined several problem areas of GNUstep:

1. Maturity of GNUstep code for developers (functionality, docs, stability)
2. GUI appearance
3. Portability
4. Applications

Gregory, behind all things you've mentioned I see a goal that can be  
expressed by the
following phrase: World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of  
GNUstep as alternative
developer framework that will help creating of alternative desktop  
environment.


Do you really think that improving website, theme (argh!) lead us to rise  
of user attention
to GNUstep? I don't think so. I see a lot of people comparing GNUstep with  
GNOME/KDE (What's
Etoile? Another desktop environment? Why we should use it?). IMHO it's  
not our target audience.

In my strong opinion our target audience could be:
- NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who misses NS/OS look, feel and user experience  
in general (I'm one of them);

- developers who knows what OpenStep and Cocoa are;
- technical people who loves WindowMaker;
- researchers, students who can use GNUstep as basement for it's works.

In my opinion GNUstep project needs more forcible approach to reach the  
goal I've phrased above.

I propose to discuss the following approach:

1. Select reference platform for GNUstep development. Make GNUstep work  
ideally on one platform and
   then port it to another. My choice is FreeBSD (Xorg 7.4, ART GUI  
backend) despite the fact that I'm
   Linux user for over 13 years. I have set of strong reasons for this, we  
can discuss it later.
2. Stop chasing MacOS functionality. Let's set our target to for example  
MacOS 10.5 for a several years.

   In other words - polish and finish current implementation.
3. Stop trying to work everywhere. Let's make it working good at one  
place, then go to another. Let's
   speak frankly - we can't compete with Qt. Despite the existing of DO,  
Objective-C and other great things.
4. Make work good ONE FINISHED gui backend on reference platform with all  
needed functionality (OpenGL,

   Fonts, Graphics).
5. Finish gnustep-gui as it is. Problem areas are: text subsystem, fonts,  
graphics to name a few.
6. Create working destop environment for developers at least. Some day I  
realized that I'm working

   inside mess of not interacting things. My plan is:
   - Create Login application
   - Create Preferences
   - Create Workspace Manager (Workspace + WindowMaker), excellent  
integration of GNUstep with it (focus,

 app management, dock interaction).
   - Create Terminal application based on Alex Malmberg application.
   - Create Mail application (GNUmail can be used as starting point).
   - Finish ProjectCenter (anyway it's my responsibility).
7. Make it clean, fast and simple as NS/OS. Personally I'm tired of  
bloated desktop environments (KDE/GNOME).

   I want improved (at reasonable degree) OPENSTEP.

It's not a plan targeting on world domination. It's plan to make  
comfortable development environment as I see it.

And if it will be comfortable to me it can be useful to somebody else.

Summarizing this long email: we should focus on achievable goals by  
narrowing down portability and loosing
competition with MacOS for now. Let's agree on strong, clean, simple  
vision of project future and users will

come.

On Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:24:01 +0300, Gregory Casamento  
greg.casame...@gmail.com wrote:



Guys,

There are a number of things which need to change on the project:

We need to:
1) improve our website.  It's been the same for years and doesn't
reflect our progress.
2) improve GNUstep's default theme as well as theming in general.
While I know some people will respond negatively to changing the
default theme from a NeXT-like look to something more modern, I
believe it's one way for us to spark interest in the project is to
update it's look.   The current look should always be available, but
not necessarily the default.
3) Improve our ability to market ourselves in general.

One thing that GNUstep has been lacking in is marketing.   I've been
trying to improve things on that front, but I'm not the best marketer
to say the very least.

Does anyone have any questions or comments regarding this?  I would
like to hear any and all input people have.

Later, GC


--
Sergii Stoian


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Pablo Giménez

100% agree

2009/10/9 Sergii Stoian stoyan...@gmail.com

 Hi, Gregory. Hi, guys.

 I can't resist expressing my opinion on GNUstep changes as I see it.

 I've defined several problem areas of GNUstep:

 1. Maturity of GNUstep code for developers (functionality, docs, stability)
 2. GUI appearance
 3. Portability
 4. Applications

 Gregory, behind all things you've mentioned I see a goal that can be
 expressed by the
 following phrase: World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of
 GNUstep as alternative
 developer framework that will help creating of alternative desktop
 environment.

 Do you really think that improving website, theme (argh!) lead us to rise
 of user attention
 to GNUstep? I don't think so. I see a lot of people comparing GNUstep with
 GNOME/KDE (What's
 Etoile? Another desktop environment? Why we should use it?). IMHO it's not
 our target audience.
 In my strong opinion our target audience could be:
 - NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who misses NS/OS look, feel and user experience
 in general (I'm one of them);
 - developers who knows what OpenStep and Cocoa are;
 - technical people who loves WindowMaker;
 - researchers, students who can use GNUstep as basement for it's works.

 In my opinion GNUstep project needs more forcible approach to reach the
 goal I've phrased above.
 I propose to discuss the following approach:

 1. Select reference platform for GNUstep development. Make GNUstep work
 ideally on one platform and
   then port it to another. My choice is FreeBSD (Xorg 7.4, ART GUI backend)
 despite the fact that I'm
   Linux user for over 13 years. I have set of strong reasons for this, we
 can discuss it later.
 2. Stop chasing MacOS functionality. Let's set our target to for example
 MacOS 10.5 for a several years.
   In other words - polish and finish current implementation.
 3. Stop trying to work everywhere. Let's make it working good at one place,
 then go to another. Let's
   speak frankly - we can't compete with Qt. Despite the existing of DO,
 Objective-C and other great things.
 4. Make work good ONE FINISHED gui backend on reference platform with all
 needed functionality (OpenGL,
   Fonts, Graphics).
 5. Finish gnustep-gui as it is. Problem areas are: text subsystem, fonts,
 graphics to name a few.
 6. Create working destop environment for developers at least. Some day I
 realized that I'm working
   inside mess of not interacting things. My plan is:
   - Create Login application
   - Create Preferences
   - Create Workspace Manager (Workspace + WindowMaker), excellent
 integration of GNUstep with it (focus,
 app management, dock interaction).
   - Create Terminal application based on Alex Malmberg application.
   - Create Mail application (GNUmail can be used as starting point).
   - Finish ProjectCenter (anyway it's my responsibility).
 7. Make it clean, fast and simple as NS/OS. Personally I'm tired of bloated
 desktop environments (KDE/GNOME).
   I want improved (at reasonable degree) OPENSTEP.

 It's not a plan targeting on world domination. It's plan to make
 comfortable development environment as I see it.
 And if it will be comfortable to me it can be useful to somebody else.

 Summarizing this long email: we should focus on achievable goals by
 narrowing down portability and loosing
 competition with MacOS for now. Let's agree on strong, clean, simple vision
 of project future and users will
 come.

 On Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:24:01 +0300, Gregory Casamento 
 greg.casame...@gmail.com wrote:

  Guys,

 There are a number of things which need to change on the project:

 We need to:
 1) improve our website.  It's been the same for years and doesn't
 reflect our progress.
 2) improve GNUstep's default theme as well as theming in general.
 While I know some people will respond negatively to changing the
 default theme from a NeXT-like look to something more modern, I
 believe it's one way for us to spark interest in the project is to
 update it's look.   The current look should always be available, but
 not necessarily the default.
 3) Improve our ability to market ourselves in general.

 One thing that GNUstep has been lacking in is marketing.   I've been
 trying to improve things on that front, but I'm not the best marketer
 to say the very least.

 Does anyone have any questions or comments regarding this?  I would
 like to hear any and all input people have.

 Later, GC


 --
 Sergii Stoian



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-- 
Un saludo
Best Regards
Pablo Giménez
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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Felix Holmgren

 While I sympathize with David who prefers (or is used) to some other coding
 style,
 the GNUstep project needs a consistent coding style and the GNU coding
 standard
 are as good a choice as any.  Since GNUstep is a GNU project, it's a natural
 choice.


Given that part of the aim of GNUstep is to track Cocoa, might it not
make sense to use the Apple coding guidelines for everything that's
written in Objective-C?

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CodingGuidelines/CodingGuidelines.html

/F


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Richard Frith-Macdonald



On 9 Oct 2009, at 13:03, Felix Holmgren wrote:

While I sympathize with David who prefers (or is used) to some  
other coding

style,
the GNUstep project needs a consistent coding style and the GNU  
coding

standard
are as good a choice as any.  Since GNUstep is a GNU project, it's  
a natural

choice.



Given that part of the aim of GNUstep is to track Cocoa, might it not
make sense to use the Apple coding guidelines for everything that's
written in Objective-C?

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CodingGuidelines/CodingGuidelines.html


Those guidelines ARE pretty much consistently used in GNUstep.  The  
coding style issues we are probably talking about here are those to do  
with the use of:


indentation
brackets
white-space

Generally, whenever someone comes along and complains about the style  
used, they have their own 'good reasons'  why their style is preferred/ 
justified.  Certainly, when I started working on the GNUstep project,  
my style was very different from the GNU style, and I could have  
provided reasons why my style was better :-)


None of those arguments carry any weight whatsoever ... because there  
are always plenty of people with other preferred styles and their own  
reasons for using them.


We use the GNU style almost solely because of the value of consistency  
(the fact that we are a GNU project probably explains why it was  
originally chosen) ... once you are used to it, you can work on any  
part of the code without finding the style hard to read.


While there are a few 'religious' people who are convinced that  
everyone else should adopt their style, almost everyone accepts that a  
consistent standard is useful and that any attempt to change the  
style, once adopted, would be severely counterproductive.




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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Markus Hitter



Am 09.10.2009 um 11:27 schrieb Sergii Stoian:

World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of GNUstep as  
alternative developer framework that will help creating of  
alternative desktop environment.


Now I can't resist to comment either ;-)

Platforms aren't just a set of kernel and appropriate drivers these  
days, they are full functioning desktops already. So, while an  
alternative to Xfce / KDE / Gnome might be desireable for some  
people, the very most open source OS users won't bother on GNUstep  
applications if they don't fit into their preferred desktop environment.


As a Ubuntu user I can seamlessly install (packaged) KDE apps and use  
them next to Gnome apps. The same should be true for GNUstep apps.


Accordingly, work on e.g. a GNUstep terminal app is pointless, as  
there are two dozen other terminal apps out there already. Strongly  
preferring WindowMaker is plain counter productive. Insisting on a  
own clipboard system will do nothing but confuse users. Those dock- 
like miniwindows are simply annoying (for Gnome users). Command line  
stuff is - well many users don't know what a command line is, after all.


Integration with the neighbor's desktop is the state of the art. Even  
the biggies like KDE or Gnome can't afford to ignore the others.



Markus


P.S.: Currently I'm using Cocotron. Much less matured, but integrates  
much better. Braindead simple porting from Cocoa, standalone  
applications !


P.P.S.: Sorry for ranting so much. I just wanted to add another  
perspective.



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/






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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Michael Thaler

Hi all,

 In my strong opinion our target audience could be:
 - NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP users who misses NS/OS look, feel and user experience  
 in general (I'm one of them);

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT: Sales of the NeXT computers were 
relatively limited, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total.

OK, there is also OpenStep, so lets say there were about 100.000 
NeXTSTEP/Openstep users in total. How many of these people really miss the 
NS/OS look, feel and user experience?

I dont really know, but if it is 10% percent, it is about 10.000 Users.
Probably it is less then that. I don't think that it makes any sense to focus 
on this group.

 - technical people who loves WindowMaker;

I used to use WindowMaker a long time ago. But frankly WindowMaker is just 
outdated and looks dull. There are probably still people using WindowMaker, 
but how many?

 - researchers, students who can use GNUstep as basement for it's works.

There has been a version of Mathematica for Nextstep. There was the lighthouse 
sweet. There are basically no scientific applications for Gnustep. I did a Ph. 
D. in physics and I doubt very much that lots of researchers will be 
interested in gnustep, at least at its current state.

I know lots of physicists who own MacBooks (including me). They like MacOS X. 
But I really doubt that many of them would use MacOS X if it would look like 
NeXTSTEP.

 2. Stop chasing MacOS functionality. Let's set our target to for example  
 MacOS 10.5 for a several years.
 In other words - polish and finish current implementation.

I think gnustep should definitivly adopt improvments made by MacOS X, 
especially Objective C 2.0 and the garbage collector. There are several 
reasons for this:

First there are many open source applications for MacOS X which could be 
ported to gnustep. If gnustep does not adopt changes / improvements from MacOS 
X this will be even harden then it is today.

Second, there are many books for learning programming on the Mac, but there 
are none for gnustep. I think it makes gnustep much more attractive to new 
developers if there are useful books.

Third: noone wants to write cross-plattform applications (for Cocoa  and 
gnustep) if gnustep lacks many of the features of Cocoa.

 6. Create working destop environment for developers at least. Some day I  
 realized that I'm working

I second that. As long as there is no desktop environment people can actually 
use, almost nobody will use gnustep applications. And without users it will be 
really hard to get new developers.

What stops me from using gnustep (etoile) as a desktop is that there is no 
browser. In my opinion gnustep / etoile  really needs a good browser using 
webkit or gecko (SimpleWebkit might be nice to work on but I don't think it 
will be good enough. Even khtml is not good enough for lots of people).

Michael



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Gregory Casamento

See below...

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 11:06 AM, Markus Hitter m...@jump-ing.de wrote:

 Am 09.10.2009 um 11:27 schrieb Sergii Stoian:

 World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of GNUstep as alternative
 developer framework that will help creating of alternative desktop
 environment.

 Now I can't resist to comment either ;-)

 Platforms aren't just a set of kernel and appropriate drivers these days,
 they are full functioning desktops already. So, while an alternative to Xfce
 / KDE / Gnome might be desireable for some people, the very most open source
 OS users won't bother on GNUstep applications if they don't fit into their
 preferred desktop environment.

 As a Ubuntu user I can seamlessly install (packaged) KDE apps and use them
 next to Gnome apps. The same should be true for GNUstep apps.

Absolutely agreed.

 Accordingly, work on e.g. a GNUstep terminal app is pointless, as there are
 two dozen other terminal apps out there already. Strongly preferring
 WindowMaker is plain counter productive.

I believe we need to start integrating better with other
desktops/window managers.

 Insisting on a own clipboard system
 will do nothing but confuse users.

The unfortunate truth here is that there are still some features of
the other guys pasteboard servers which don't server our needs at all.

 Those dock-like miniwindows are simply
 annoying (for Gnome users).

You can turn them off.

 Command line stuff is - well many users don't
 know what a command line is, after all.

??  I'm not sure what you mean here.

 Integration with the neighbor's desktop is the state of the art. Even the
 biggies like KDE or Gnome can't afford to ignore the others.

Indeed.


 Markus


 P.S.: Currently I'm using Cocotron. Much less matured, but integrates much
 better. Braindead simple porting from Cocoa, standalone applications !

I'm sorry to hear this.   GNUstep, in my opinion, does need something
similar to Cocotron's SDK.   Dr. Schaller has already made something
similar for ARM so that he can cross compile for the ARM platform so
it's not terribly difficult... it's just not something we've done for
Windows yet.

 P.P.S.: Sorry for ranting so much. I just wanted to add another perspective.

That's fine.

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread David Chisnall


On 9 Oct 2009, at 16:34, Gregory Casamento wrote:


I'm sorry to hear this.   GNUstep, in my opinion, does need something
similar to Cocotron's SDK.   Dr. Schaller has already made something
similar for ARM so that he can cross compile for the ARM platform so
it's not terribly difficult... it's just not something we've done for
Windows yet.


Apple, unfortunately, branched clang for XCode 3.2 just before I put a  
lot of fixes in.  Their next release, however, will include a version  
of clang that can target the GNU runtime properly.  To cross-compile  
for Windows / Linux / whatever you will just need copies of the  
relevant headers and to set the include paths and target triple  
correctly, so we can probably provide a plugin that does that quite  
easily.


That said, if you use svn or some other version control system from  
XCode, then it's trivial to automate building on a native platform  
already with GNUstep; just check out your svn repository and run  
pbxbuild; put this in an hourly cron job in a VM or a real machine,  
and you've got an automated build.


David

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Sergii Stoian


On Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:06:45 +0300, Markus Hitter m...@jump-ing.de wrote:


Am 09.10.2009 um 11:27 schrieb Sergii Stoian:

World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of GNUstep as  
alternative developer framework that will help creating of alternative  
desktop environment.


Now I can't resist to comment either ;-)

Platforms aren't just a set of kernel and appropriate drivers these  
days, they are full functioning desktops already. So, while an  
alternative to Xfce / KDE / Gnome might be desireable for some people,  
the very most open source OS users won't bother on GNUstep applications  
if they don't fit into their preferred desktop environment.


Markus, why do you think that users of Xfce/KDE/GNOME should bother on
GNUstep applications at all? I guess user first tries to find app that is  
native to

it's DE. Second he looks for neighbor variants. If you want GNUstep apps to
fit into Xfce/KDE/GNOME then you need to change not only look (scrollbars,
menu style, etc.) but also FEEL of applications. Generally speaking,  
GNUstep

application should look and feel as user's preferred desktop application.
Finally it leads to bloating of code and problems with maintenance  
(considering

our developer resources).
Does GNUstep applications should look  feel as Qt and GTK+ apps? This is  
a dead

end for GNUstep project I guess.

As a Ubuntu user I can seamlessly install (packaged) KDE apps and use  
them next to Gnome apps. The same should be true for GNUstep apps.


Accordingly, work on e.g. a GNUstep terminal app is pointless, as there  
are two dozen other terminal apps out there already.


And browsers, file managers, IDEs, mail clients, editors... That's what I'm
trying to say about. There will be no charm in such approach. NS/OS has  
charm

even today I think.


Strongly preferring WindowMaker is plain counter productive.


Using GNUstep applications in, for example, GNOME is stupid. I see no  
sense in

using 'TextEdit' instead of 'gedit' and so on. Sorry, It's not an argument.
I see WindowMaker as: 1. part of Workspace Manager 2. reference window  
manager

for GNUstep applications.

Insisting on a own clipboard system will do nothing but confuse users.  
Those dock-like miniwindows are simply annoying (for Gnome users).  
Command line stuff is - well many users don't know what a command line  
is, after all.


Integration with the neighbor's desktop is the state of the art. Even  
the biggies like KDE or Gnome can't afford to ignore the others.


GNOME and KDE has similar point of view on how desktop should be organized.
NS/OS has different philosophy. It's not only about lookfeel.



Markus


P.S.: Currently I'm using Cocotron. Much less matured, but integrates  
much better. Braindead simple porting from Cocoa, standalone  
applications !


P.P.S.: Sorry for ranting so much. I just wanted to add another  
perspective.


I guess everybody agreed that this is not dispute - it's exchange of  
opinions.


--
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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Gregory Casamento

Stef,

This does seem to be the consensus

Now we need help to actually make it happen.

GC

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 7:30 PM, Stef Bidi stefanb...@gmail.com wrote:
 Forgot to reply to all!

 On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Nicola Pero
 nicola.p...@meta-innovation.com wrote:

  It would undoubtedly be good to have some packager-specific
  documentation, but obviously the target readership is a very small
  group 

 We *do* have packager documentation, in

  core/make/README.Packaging

 Feel free to add a short section about what was discussed here. :-)

 I saw Richard committed something there.  This is really the first time I've
 ever heard of GlobalDomain.plist, and will not forget it.


  - How does this allow a packager to install and remove defaults as
  part of package installation / uninstallation?  Presumably you can
  use plmerge to install them (again, is this documented anywhere?),
  but how do you uninstall them?

 I agree with Richard's later suggestion that the package system might deal
 with that
 by having a directory where each package installs a .plist upon
 installation, and removes
 it upon deinstallation.  At the end of each package
 installation/deinstallation, the
 package scripts could do a plmerge so that all the currently existing
 .plists in the
 directory are plmerged to create the global default plist, which is hence
 kept up-to-date. :-)

 That said, it should probably be used with restrain ;-)

 Presumably you have a specific example in mind where it makes particular
 sense (Etoile ?); but
 in general, I personally don't see a reason why installing a package
 should change some system defaults.
 Installing a package doesn't necessarily mean enabling it.

 Eg, I could be installing 10 or 20 themes or other GNUstep GUI-changing
 bundles, but that doesn't mean
 every theme that is installed must be trying to force all users to switch
 to it.  I'd expect to have
 a Preferences panel somewhere where I can change my own user defaults and
 activate/deactivate the bundles
 or themes I want/don't want.  Different users might activate/deactivate
 different bundles.

 I agree with you, but the packager/distribution developers need to know what
 they want.  For example, in Debian when I install gnome-core I get nothing
 but a plain GNOME desktop with no theming (default GTK theme), but when I
 install gnome I also get a few themes and theme engines installed but only
 1 is sets Clearlook as the default theme.  If the themes are installed
 separately (outside the gnome package) nothing happens, they're just
 installed and it's up to you to do something.

 Similarly, a gnustep package might want to install some core packages and
 an etoile package install Camaleon and it's themes and set 1 of them as
 default, setup horizontal menus, etc.

 So I think it is more important to have a very good preference application
 that allow real users
 to configure their environment to suit their needs, including turning
 on/off bundles or extensions. :-)

 Thanks


 By the way, is anyone keeping notes so that this won't all disappear after
 the discussion dies down?  What I've gotten so far is:

 * Seems to be a consensus in keep GNUstep with it's default theme.
  GlobalDomain.plist allows packagers or distributions to global define their
 theme if it pleases them.
 * Everyone seems to want a new website.  Content needs to be looked over
 because there is a lot of old and outdated information out there confusing
 newcomers.
 ** On the same topic, people also seem to be getting detracted by the
 decentralized information about GNUstep.
 * Packages, packages, packages.  Last I heard we lost the person who did the
 packages for the Debian project (which is really bad).  I've also been
 slacking on the Slackware packages (lack of time and a dedicated play
 computer).
 * Code beautification?

 Anything I missed so far?

 Stefan

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread David Chisnall


On 9 Oct 2009, at 19:19, Gregory Casamento wrote:


Well, yeah... I do know about pbxbuild since I helped develop it.
The point is that the majority of mac devs expect things to be done
completely from the mac.


My point was that this is something we could automate pretty  
trivially.  I managed to get Darwine building (but not running)  
Windows versions of GNUstep apps, and it would be pretty simple to  
package up a virtual appliance that people could open with VirtualBox  
on their Mac and just point at an svn repository and get automated  
builds.  Same with Darwine; we could package up a .wine directory  
containing GNUstep with this.


If someone is interested in cross developing from OS X (I'm not  
especially), then it's the kind of project that someone without much  
programming experience could put together.


David

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Markus Hitter



Sergii, please see below.


Am 09.10.2009 um 17:34 schrieb Gregory Casamento:


Command line stuff is - well many users don't
know what a command line is, after all.


??  I'm not sure what you mean here.


Well, malfunctions in GNUstep are often answered by a few text  
commands which fix things. For example, Wolfgang Lux explained just  
yesterday how to fix services in Terminal.app.


While Terminal.app is a special case in this regard, you can't expect  
users to fix things by typing commands in a shell. Things are either  
figured by the app without user interaction (preferred), or need a GUI.




Am 09.10.2009 um 18:15 schrieb Sergii Stoian:

Markus, why do you think that users of Xfce/KDE/GNOME should bother  
on GNUstep applications at all?


Because quite a few nice applications are written in GNUstep. Think  
about GNUmail, it has just the right design for users used to Apple  
Mail.


Think about TextEdit, which roughly matches Apple's TextEdit and can  
(well, should be able to) handle the RTF format.


Think about all those Cocoa apps out there just waiting to be ported  
to Linux or *BSD. There are plenty.



If you want GNUstep apps to fit into Xfce/KDE/GNOME then you need  
to change not only look (scrollbars, menu style, etc.) but also  
FEEL of applications.


For now I think it would be a big step forward if GNUstep wouldn't  
conflict with other desktops. If the dock-like miniwindows can be  
turned off, please do so by default in a Gnome or KDE environment.  
For the window containing the menu, respect the bars on top and on  
bottom of the screen. If the current desktop has scroll bars on the  
right, put them there in GNUstep apps as well.



Does GNUstep applications should look  feel as Qt and GTK+ apps?


There's no need to give up on the traditional behaviour for those  
prefering it.




Using GNUstep applications in, for example, GNOME is stupid.


Ouch.


Markus

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Matt Rice

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Nicola Pero
nicola.p...@meta-innovation.com wrote:

 Additionally I really dislike the coding style, not because it's not
 mine, but because it fails to make the code more readable. On the
 other hand, there was code by Fred which looked really ok, so maybe
 it's just about using the coding style in a sane way All I
 wanted to say is, that it's not that easy to start hacking inside
 the GNUstep core libraries.

 Completely agree.  Good coding conventions are picked because they
 make things that are wrong look wrong or generate compiler errors /
 warnings.  The GNU coding conventions were picked by selecting at
 random various bits from all existing coding conventions in the hope
 that that would make everyone happy.  They are a horrible mash of
 things.  The indenting style is horrible, for example, and only works
 if you have your editor set up in exactly the same way as RMS;
 mixing  tabs and spaces for indenting is one of the most stupid ideas
 I've  ever seen.  The convention of putting a space after function
 names and  before the open bracket makes code harder to read because
 it makes it  difficult to tell without reading the context that
 something is an  argument list rather than a subexpression.  In fact,
 almost everything  about the GNU coding conventions looks painfully
 stupid to anyone with  a basic understanding of how the human visual
 system works, but as an  official GNU project we are stuck with it.

 I didn't know you have to stick to the GNU coding guidelines if you are
 an official GNU project. Now I understand all the people complaining
 about gcc being unreadable...

 Just to clarify for the non-developers, GCC being unreadable is a completely
 different problem,
 not particularly due to the coding style. ;-)

 Having a standard coding style for the whole GNUstep project is really
 important as it makes
 it easier to copy/move code from one part of the project to the other.
  Using a standard coding
 style that is documented and used by many other projects is also good as
 contributors will
 be immediately familiar with it.

 The GNU coding standards are used by a large number of projects with a lot
 of contributors
 and popularity so can't really be blamed if GNUstep is less popular than,
 say, GIMP (which also
 happens to follow the GNU coding standards) or any of the other million
 projects that use the
 GNU coding standards or some variants of them.

 While I sympathize with David who prefers (or is used) to some other coding
 style,
 the GNUstep project needs a consistent coding style and the GNU coding
 standard
 are as good a choice as any.  Since GNUstep is a GNU project, it's a natural
 choice.

 By the way the GNU coding standards are not bad, in fact I personally like
 them (mostly because
 my eyesight is really bad and whitespace is much more effective at
 separating tokens than
 brackets or commas).  There are some details I'd change, but they certainly
 are not an unusual
 or weird choice for a large free software project.

To me it is about separating groups of tokens, e.g. if you are going
to separate like this

[thing foo: arg1 bar: arg2];

and insist on including that space between the 'foo:arg1' group,
the whole message send looks androgynous with parts of the selectors
mixed in with their arguments...

compared with
[thing foo:arg1 bar:arg2];

it is very easy for me to pick out which args go with which parts of
the selector, and
which message is being sent...

 If it's a burning issue for many developers, I guess changing the coding
 style to something else
 could be discussed.  There would be *lots* of reformatting to do if we ever
 reach an agreement
 on some other coding style. ;-)

consider me on fire then, the reformatting is no issue for me, since I
generally reformat the code i'm looking at anyways
then I fix whatever i'm doing, and to send a patch to GNUstep do a
clean checkout then uglify my code to fit the GNUstep style...

I did a quick google code search on some random method
and counted up how the arguments were formatted

92: with space between colon and argument
265: without space between colon and argument

not really a scientific study of developer preference... (considering
some of my code showed up in the with-space list which i can't stand),
there is also bound to be duplicates of code between different
versions of the same software...

so if you're going to insist on one true whitespace,
don't insist on one only a minority of developers use,
or people are bound to complain, and call the gnustep code ugly.

so just in case i haven't made my stance on the subject clear, I'd
have to Ditto what icicle and David are saying.


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


Hi,



- technical people who loves WindowMaker;



I used to use WindowMaker a long time ago. But frankly WindowMaker is just 
outdated and looks dull. There are probably still people using WindowMaker, 
but how many?


  
I'm one of them. I got interested into GNUstep also because of it looks. 
I love windowmaker. It is the only thing I use on free Unices.

It is sleek, unobtrusive, professional. The same should be true for GNUstep.
GNUstep stuff is generally almost there, but there are drawing glitches, 
ugly icons, imperfectly done interfaces which makes it not on par with 
openstep. And we should be even better. Improved, more complete.


Also, this concept of outdated is really ridiculous. Style has no 
time. People like Rolex. Waterman. Montblanc. Breguet.

People like Vetiver, 4711 Koelnisch Wasser.
People like Veuve Cliquot Poinsardin.

These items are made as our fathers or our grand-fatehrs could have 
bought them. Serious people like them because they are masterpieces.


Now of course, other people change dresses every few months, have a 
Swatch, use the latest perfume from Kiko or Pupa or whatever. They 
drink  some fashion-drink like bacardi breezer.


Riccardo
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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


Hey,


As a new user I ahve to say I have been trying to use GNUstep for a while
but two weeks ago I found the time to compile and install everything.
So for a new user is not easy to get GNUstep, there are tw problems:
- Distributions don't have a good support, I am usign fedora and I have to
built everything from scratch no packages at all.

  

Richard Stonehouse provides them.

I used to provide source-RPMs which are easy to build and install.

Right now we both lost a bit touch with the effort, but are as you read 
this trying to regain lost time.


Riccardo



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Markus Hitter



Am 09.10.2009 um 20:23 schrieb David Chisnall:


On 9 Oct 2009, at 19:19, Gregory Casamento wrote:


Well, yeah... I do know about pbxbuild since I helped develop it.
The point is that the majority of mac devs expect things to be done
completely from the mac.


My point was that this is something we could automate pretty  
trivially.  I managed to get Darwine building (but not running)  
Windows versions of GNUstep apps, and it would be pretty simple to  
package up a virtual appliance that people could open with  
VirtualBox on their Mac and just point at an svn repository and get  
automated builds.  Same with Darwine; we could package up a .wine  
directory containing GNUstep with this.


Does this mean GNUstep cross-development can be done from within  
Xcode already or do you want to use Darwine to run ProjectCenter/Gorm  
for development? For the later, I fear this isn't exactly what  
developers mean with completely on the Mac.


An ability to run/debug GNUstep/Windows executables on the Mac would  
be a nice addition, though.



Markus

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


Hey,

I think you have many good points there. However, GNUstep is a wide 
project and targets many different users.
Many things you want do not clash with other goals, they only divert 
manpower. But keep in consideration that in an opensource project people 
do whatever they deem interesting or useful, there isn't a central planning.





1. Maturity of GNUstep code for developers (functionality, docs, 
stability)

2. GUI appearance
3. Portability
4. Applications

Gregory, behind all things you've mentioned I see a goal that can be 
expressed by the
following phrase: World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of 
GNUstep as alternative
developer framework that will help creating of alternative desktop 
environment.


This statement is true, though, do you agree? The problem is that it is 
reductive, but I think it is true. GNUstep is perhaps more.
Do you really think that improving website, theme (argh!) lead us to 
rise of user attention
to GNUstep? I don't think so. I see a lot of people comparing GNUstep 
with GNOME/KDE (What's
I think so. We may argue about theming, but a good, informative and 
usable website is really useful!
3. Stop trying to work everywhere. Let's make it working good at one 
place, then go to another. Let's
   speak frankly - we can't compete with Qt. Despite the existing of 
DO, Objective-C and other great things.

I disagree here. Being portable is a big asset and we can do that!
5. Finish gnustep-gui as it is. Problem areas are: text subsystem, 
fonts, graphics to name a few.

Agreed...
6. Create working destop environment for developers at least. Some day 
I realized that I'm working

   inside mess of not interacting things. My plan is:
   - Create Login application

working on that, check GAP

   - Create Preferences
what's wrong with SystemPreferences? Recently also GWorkspace's indexing 
panel  got fixed.
   - Create Workspace Manager (Workspace + WindowMaker), excellent 
integration of GNUstep with it (focus,

 app management, dock interaction).
That's fine, but I'd put it lower priority. I care that we need to work 
well with other windowmanagers too. The best I see medium term is to 
enable/disable duplicate components and create a gnsutep-based 
configuration tool

   - Create Terminal application based on Alex Malmberg application.
it can be improved indeed. It works well, but I miss some features. ON 
the todo list.

   - Create Mail application (GNUmail can be used as starting point).
This is a sensible point. GNUmail is unmaintained sadly. Also in some 
sense it is too much having features here and there, while it lacks 
certain things i'd like.

   - Finish ProjectCenter (anyway it's my responsibility).
Oh I hope that! I want to be able to maintain most projects in GAP with 
PC. You knwo I am a long-time PC user. Before even you started 
maintaining it...
7. Make it clean, fast and simple as NS/OS. Personally I'm tired of 
bloated desktop environments (KDE/GNOME).

   I want improved (at reasonable degree) OPENSTEP.
Totally agreed! Even Mac is not clean anymore. I'd like something along 
mac 10.2/10.3 in terms of features, but with a more consistent, less 
shiny interface, more NeXTstep...


It's not a plan targeting on world domination. It's plan to make 
comfortable development environment as I see it.

And if it will be comfortable to me it can be useful to somebody else.

Sure, it needs to be somethign useful and clean. I don't want to aim at 
GNOME or KDE; but something along the line of Xfce.
Summarizing this long email: we should focus on achievable goals by 
narrowing down portability and loosing
competition with MacOS for now. Let's agree on strong, clean, simple 
vision of project future and users will

come.


Agreed. We need both users and developers.

But I can also tell you that most development in the past 2 years was 
good. GNUstep improved (much more than it broke). But a bit too little 
unfortunately in some areas and thus they are unfinished...


Riccardo


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


Hey,

Gregory Casamento wrote:



Accordingly, work on e.g. a GNUstep terminal app is pointless, as there are
two dozen other terminal apps out there already. Strongly preferring
WindowMaker is plain counter productive.



I believe we need to start integrating better with other
desktops/window managers.

  
Maybe, But from my point of view we need to integrate better with 
Windowmaker itself! If I have focus problems, windows ordering problems, 
event problems, window and menu placement problems with WIndowMaker, 
then it is really crap!!

Insisting on a own clipboard system
will do nothing but confuse users.



The unfortunate truth here is that there are still some features of
the other guys pasteboard servers which don't server our needs at all.

  

TO each one its ow. We can have ours :)

Those dock-like miniwindows are simply
annoying (for Gnome users).



You can turn them off.

  
Well, SystemPreferences has a convenient panel for defaults. If only 
people would install and use it... I don't know Ubuntu, but debian 
doesn't ship it.


Riccardo
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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Sergii Stoian

Hi, Riccardo.

2009/10/9 Riccardo Mottola mul...@ngi.it

 Hey,

 I think you have many good points there. However, GNUstep is a wide project
 and targets many different users.
 Many things you want do not clash with other goals, they only divert
 manpower. But keep in consideration that in an opensource project people do
 whatever they deem interesting or useful, there isn't a central planning.


Sure, you're right! I'm start thinking that fork of gui+back for some period
of time is not such silly thing...




 1. Maturity of GNUstep code for developers (functionality, docs,
 stability)
 2. GUI appearance
 3. Portability
 4. Applications

 Gregory, behind all things you've mentioned I see a goal that can be
 expressed by the
 following phrase: World (all stuff outside of GNUstep) acceptance of
 GNUstep as alternative
 developer framework that will help creating of alternative desktop
 environment.

  This statement is true, though, do you agree? The problem is that it is
 reductive, but I think it is true. GNUstep is perhaps more.


Sure, I agree! Considering the statement above making 'modern' themes,
integrating apps into foreign DE is not the first thing we should focus on.



  Do you really think that improving website, theme (argh!) lead us to rise
 of user attention
 to GNUstep? I don't think so. I see a lot of people comparing GNUstep with
 GNOME/KDE (What's

 I think so. We may argue about theming, but a good, informative and usable
 website is really useful!

 3. Stop trying to work everywhere. Let's make it working good at one
 place, then go to another. Let's
   speak frankly - we can't compete with Qt. Despite the existing of DO,
 Objective-C and other great things.

 I disagree here. Being portable is a big asset and we can do that!


Sure it's great asset for mature project. The problem is in spreading the
efforts of developers, code becomes hard to read... and code is not become
more mature then before.



  5. Finish gnustep-gui as it is. Problem areas are: text subsystem, fonts,
 graphics to name a few.

 Agreed...

 6. Create working destop environment for developers at least. Some day I
 realized that I'm working
   inside mess of not interacting things. My plan is:
   - Create Login application

 working on that, check GAP

   - Create Preferences

 what's wrong with SystemPreferences? Recently also GWorkspace's indexing
 panel  got fixed.


Probably I just don't like it... But it's personal, never mind.


   - Create Workspace Manager (Workspace + WindowMaker), excellent
 integration of GNUstep with it (focus,
 app management, dock interaction).
  That's fine, but I'd put it lower priority. I care that we need to work
 well with other windowmanagers too. The best I see medium term is to
 enable/disable duplicate components and create a gnsutep-based configuration
 tool


Don't get me wrong but I don't care about support of other window managers
until Window Maker support is weak.


   - Create Terminal application based on Alex Malmberg application.
  it can be improved indeed. It works well, but I miss some features. ON the
 todo list.

   - Create Mail application (GNUmail can be used as starting point).

 This is a sensible point. GNUmail is unmaintained sadly. Also in some sense
 it is too much having features here and there, while it lacks certain
 things i'd like.

   - Finish ProjectCenter (anyway it's my responsibility).

 Oh I hope that! I want to be able to maintain most projects in GAP with PC.
 You knwo I am a long-time PC user. Before even you started maintaining it...

 7. Make it clean, fast and simple as NS/OS. Personally I'm tired of
 bloated desktop environments (KDE/GNOME).
   I want improved (at reasonable degree) OPENSTEP.

  Totally agreed! Even Mac is not clean anymore. I'd like something along
 mac 10.2/10.3 in terms of features, but with a more consistent, less shiny
 interface, more NeXTstep...


I can understand people who want new modern look. But then we need designers
for that. Look at the Project Center icons - they're just ugly! Keith Ohlfs
is a professional designer and I'm afraid we can't create something like
that. So just let's use it!



 It's not a plan targeting on world domination. It's plan to make
 comfortable development environment as I see it.
 And if it will be comfortable to me it can be useful to somebody else.

  Sure, it needs to be somethign useful and clean. I don't want to aim at
 GNOME or KDE; but something along the line of Xfce.

 Summarizing this long email: we should focus on achievable goals by
 narrowing down portability and loosing
 competition with MacOS for now. Let's agree on strong, clean, simple
 vision of project future and users will
 come.


 Agreed. We need both users and developers.

 But I can also tell you that most development in the past 2 years was good.
 GNUstep improved (much more than it broke). But a bit too little
 unfortunately in some areas and thus they are unfinished...


I've never said that all

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Pablo Giménez

El 9 de octubre de 2009 21:39, Riccardo Mottola mul...@ngi.it escribió:

 Hey,

  As a new user I ahve to say I have been trying to use GNUstep for a while
 but two weeks ago I found the time to compile and install everything.
 So for a new user is not easy to get GNUstep, there are tw problems:
 - Distributions don't have a good support, I am usign fedora and I have to
 built everything from scratch no packages at all.



 Richard Stonehouse provides them.

Would be worth to have any link in the website


 I used to provide source-RPMs which are easy to build and install.

 Right now we both lost a bit touch with the effort, but are as you read
 this trying to regain lost time.

 Riccardo




-- 
Un saludo
Best Regards
Pablo Giménez
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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Nicola Pero





By the way the GNU coding standards are not bad, in fact I  
personally like

them (mostly because
my eyesight is really bad and whitespace is much more effective at
separating tokens than
brackets or commas).  There are some details I'd change, but they  
certainly

are not an unusual
or weird choice for a large free software project.


To me it is about separating groups of tokens, e.g. if you are going
to separate like this

[thing foo: arg1 bar: arg2];

and insist on including that space between the 'foo:arg1' group,
the whole message send looks androgynous with parts of the selectors
mixed in with their arguments...

compared with
[thing foo:arg1 bar:arg2];

it is very easy for me to pick out which args go with which parts of
the selector, and
which message is being sent...


My personal preference is to do

 [thing foo: arg1  bar: arg2]

(Note the double-space between the two parts of the selector).

That way, I can easily visually tokenize it when I read it.

Of course, it's my personal preference and it's as good as any. ;-)

Thanks


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-09 Thread Jamie Ramone

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Michael Thaler
michael.tha...@physik.tu-muenchen.de wrote:
 Hi,

 Because it has professional look and feel. I don't like any theme for Qt
 or GTK+.

 Sorry, I don't buy that a professional look has to be gray and dull.
 For Qt/KDE there is a CDE theme. But I doubt that many people use it.

The gray and dull has nothing to do with it but, rather, the lack of
glitter. I happen to work for a big company and while we use PCs with
Windows XP (using it's default theme), the tools made specifically for
us use the old Win NT look from the mid 90's. In fact one monitoring
tool remotely running on some UNIX system and it's made with Motif.
I've never seen any professional use glittery interfaces, they go for
more neutral looking ones.

 Finally maybe you want Leopard look of GNUstep applications as default?

 Having a MacBook with Snow Leopard, yes I would love to have a Linux desktop
 looking as elegant and polished as Snow Leopard.

No argument there, everyone has different taste. So this is a case, in
my own opinion, to favour skins in GNUstep as done via Chameleon for
instance.

 WindowMaker is window manager, it's not DE. People tend to use desktop
 environment.

 I know. But how many people use WindowMaker with KDE or Gnome?

 What are they interested in? Let me guess: Qt(KDE) or GTK(GNOME)?

 My former institute used KDE as desktop. But people usually worked with
 Mathematica or MatLab. If we did coding it was mostly low-level numerical 
 stuff
 in Fortran, C or C++. I doubt that it is a good idea to target researchers
 with gnustep. What advantage would gnustep give them?

No less than the ones you mentioned, and more considering GNUstep is
way more advanced in terms of usability and consistency.

 So we need MacOS style GUI, right?

 In my personal opinion it would be nice to have a MacOS X style GUI. But I
 know this is a matter of taste and not everyone things that the MacOS X GUI is
 great.

Agreed.

 Another day Apple discards GCC in favor of LLVM. We need to quickly adopt
 this
 change after Apple? That's why GNUstep in it's current state today.

 Well, for me llvm and having a garbage collector and blocks would make gnustep
 much more interesting.

Maybe, maybe not. After studying the Grand Central Dispatch docs, I
realized I could implement the whole thing without the need for
compiler awareness (i.e. as a pure library, no ^ operator). The only
thing it would miss would be the environment snapshots, but this
property is not essential. And such code could also be (partly)
included in the GCC so one could end up having blocks with compiler
awareness. And considering that the GCC is freedomware, and can thus
have new features added any time, I don't see it as being THAT much
behind some other compilers. As for GC, do you REALLY want that? I
think it's way overrated. It tends to encourage bad programming
practices, and usually kills performance.

 And I see no problem using Opera or Firefox. That is the problem I'm trying
 to attract attention: GNUstep developers always ready to start
 mega-projects
 but only few individuals trying to make GNUstep finished.

 There is no problem using Opera or Firefox with gnustep, except they do not
 integrate well. But what is acutally the point of using gnustep/etoile as a
 desktep and then using Opera or Firefox? And what about an office suite? a 
 good
 mail client (well, I don't know how good Mail.app is).

 My personal plan is to port an open source application from MacOS X to gnustep
 because I think without applications noone will use gnustep. Unfortunately I
 am currently quite busy at work, so that I don't have much time.

Excelent! Mondo coolness! Party on Mike!

 Greetings,
 Michael


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Besos, abrazos, confeti y aplausos.
Jamie Ramone
El Vikingo


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-08 Thread Paul Csanyi

Hi,

2009/10/7  ici...@mail.cg.tuwien.ac.at:

 Simply put, GNUstep gui needs an associated desktop to fit in. And please
 spare me with the default excuse, namely WindowMaker integrates with
 GNUstep :) Maybe this sounds a little harsh, but most people out there
 don't care for WindowMaker. Be it users or potential developers, they prefer
 a more modern Desktop/Window manager.

I don't think so.
The Window Maker Window Manager (it's a Desktop Environment too) is much better
for me than any other Desktop Environment (GNOME or KDE).

-- 
Regards, Paul Chany
http://csanyi-pal.info


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 7 Oct 2009, at 22:28, Stef Bidi wrote:


The second, which is a little deeper, is that there's no way to  
globally define defaults.  If I'm out there creating a GNUstep  
package (and I mostly do for Slackware, I just need to get on it for  
13.0) there's not way for me to set a default, preferred theme-- 
which is what the GUI toolkits above allow you to do--there is just  
no way for me to do that.


Actually, you can define global defaults in the GobalDefaults.plist  
file, which lives in the same directory as the GNUstep configuration  
file (and you can also put simple string values directly in  
GNUstep.conf using GNUSTEP_EXTRA if you don't want the overhead of  
loading GlobalDefaults.plist).
See http://www.gnustep.org/resources/documentation/Developer/Base/Reference/index.html 
 and the NSUserDefaults documentation.




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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 7 Oct 2009, at 23:37, Riccardo Mottola wrote:

Richard, could you add the ability to change the theme icon in  
Thematic?


It's already there ... just click on it, and an open panel will come  
up for you to select the new icon image.




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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 7 Oct 2009, at 23:00, David Chisnall wrote:


On 7 Oct 2009, at 22:38, Matt Rice wrote:

On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Stef Bidi stefanb...@gmail.com  
wrote:


snip


13.0) there's not way for me
to set a default, preferred theme--which is what the GUI  
toolkits above
allow you to do--there is just no way for me to do that.  I know  
it's been
brought up a few times in the past, and if I remember correctly  
it's because
of the way NSUserDefaults is setup, so (again, in my opinion)  
that's where

the problem lies.


I believe you are mistaken, NSUserDefaults handles global settings
fine, you just need to add the default to the NSGlobalDomain,


Unless I have missed something, NSGlobalDomain is a per-user thing.


Yes.

There is no sensible way of setting a default value for a user  
default globally.


GlobalDefaults.plist does that.

 Apps can do this via the standard APIs, but there is no way for  
packagers to provide a default value for a default.


GlobalDefaults.plist does that.

For example, we can put Camaelon and Nesedah in a package, but there  
is no way to make it the default theme for any users who have not  
selected a theme as part of the package installation.


GlobalDefaults.plist does that.

This question has been asked on the list before and no one replied  
with a way, so I assume it is still impossible.


Maybe nobody bothered to answer, or they did and you missed it.

It would be nice to have a standard directory for plists which are  
merged together to provide the default user default values.  I  
looked at doing this a while ago, but it required implementing  
whiteout in the per-user defaults (so you could delete a default  
that exists in this directory).


The per-user defaults override the global ones ... what we don't have  
is a mechanism for having global defaults which can't be  
overridden  but I'm not sure we want to do that (it seems to be  
against the spirit of free software).




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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


On 8 Oct 2009, at 07:29, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:


GlobalDefaults.plist does that.


Two questions then:

- Is this actually documented anywhere?  I see a vague reference to it  
in NSUserDefaults, but packagers are absolutely not going to read API  
docs (and should not be expected to.


- How does this allow a packager to install and remove defaults as  
part of package installation / uninstallation?  Presumably you can use  
plmerge to install them (again, is this documented anywhere?), but how  
do you uninstall them?


David


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-08 Thread Richard Stonehouse


On Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:34:39 +0200, Riccardo Mottola mul...@ngi.it wrote:


For example the download page is something people expect, yet it is
confused. We have mirrors, do we still have them?


I am the perpetrator of the (rather horrible!) PHP hack used in this page.

The mirrors were always a bit problematic - even then, some of the alleged  
mirrors didn't work, and those that did often didn't get updated with the  
latest changes until long after they had happened. The mirrors were  
important because, at that time, the GNUstep site had very limited  
bandwidth and people were encouraged to use mirrors instead. I think this  
problem is historical.



If, then I'd expect something like:

package 1 [download version 1 main site]
[download version 1 mirror 1]
[download version 1 mirror 2]

package 2 [download version 2 main site]
[download version 2 mirror 1]
[download version 2 mirror 2]


The idea behind the way it is done is that the user can select their  
preferred mirror initially and it is then used for all their downloads  
from that page. I think that offering a per-package choice of mirror would  
be (slightly) more confusing for the user - having to think about 'what  
packages do I want?' and 'where can I get them from?' at the same time -  
and would clutter the information on the page. However the best solution  
might well be simply to drop the mirrors.



On the general questions, some feedback from a few years ago when I  
advertised a set of GNUstep packages on the SuSE newsgroup:


  - the NeXT 'look and feel' was of interest to at
least some people;

  - there were complaints about the 'old-fashioned'
default appearance of GNUstep and the (then) lack
of ability to customise it;

  - there were complaints about the apparent lack of
integration between GNUstep and the WindowMaker
window manager.

--
Richard Stonehouse



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 8 Oct 2009, at 10:32, David Chisnall wrote:


On 8 Oct 2009, at 07:29, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:


GlobalDefaults.plist does that.


Two questions then:

- Is this actually documented anywhere?  I see a vague reference to  
it in NSUserDefaults, but packagers are absolutely not going to read  
API docs (and should not be expected to.


With the documentation for GNUstep.conf in the main base library  
documentation (I put a link in an earlier email).
I think you have to be realistic ... a packager *does* have to read  
some documentation in order to package a big system like GNUstep  
properly.
It would undoubtedly be good to have some packager-specific  
documentation, but obviously the target readership is a very small  
group 


- How does this allow a packager to install and remove defaults as  
part of package installation / uninstallation?  Presumably you can  
use plmerge to install them (again, is this documented anywhere?),  
but how do you uninstall them?


This is a text property list ... a packager would manage it in exactly  
the same way as any other text file they install/uninstall with their  
packaging system.
Probably something as simple as 'rm -rf /etc/GNUstep' when you are  
removing GNUstep from your system.






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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 8 Oct 2009, at 11:50, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

- How does this allow a packager to install and remove defaults as  
part of package installation / uninstallation?  Presumably you can  
use plmerge to install them (again, is this documented anywhere?),  
but how do you uninstall them?


This is a text property list ... a packager would manage it in  
exactly the same way as any other text file they install/uninstall  
with their packaging system.
Probably something as simple as 'rm -rf /etc/GNUstep' when you are  
removing GNUstep from your system.


You misunderstand the question.  Here's a concrete example:

Camaelon, EtoileBehavior and EtoileMenu all provide appkit user  
bundles.  They are each installed as separate packages.  A person  
creating a package for them wants to make them default for every  
user.  This requires:


1) When the package is installed, each needs to be added to the  
NSGlobalDomain GSUserAppKitBundles array.


2) When the package is uninstalled, each needs to be removed from the  
array.


Step 1 can, I believe, be accomplished with plmerge.  How would you go  
about doing step 2?


David


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 8 Oct 2009, at 12:00, David Chisnall wrote:



On 8 Oct 2009, at 11:50, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

- How does this allow a packager to install and remove defaults as  
part of package installation / uninstallation?  Presumably you can  
use plmerge to install them (again, is this documented anywhere?),  
but how do you uninstall them?


This is a text property list ... a packager would manage it in  
exactly the same way as any other text file they install/uninstall  
with their packaging system.
Probably something as simple as 'rm -rf /etc/GNUstep' when you are  
removing GNUstep from your system.


You misunderstand the question.  Here's a concrete example:

Camaelon, EtoileBehavior and EtoileMenu all provide appkit user  
bundles.  They are each installed as separate packages.  A person  
creating a package for them wants to make them default for every  
user.  This requires:


1) When the package is installed, each needs to be added to the  
NSGlobalDomain GSUserAppKitBundles array.


2) When the package is uninstalled, each needs to be removed from  
the array.


Step 1 can, I believe, be accomplished with plmerge.  How would you  
go about doing step 2?


You are right, I did misunderstand ... I understood the term  
'packager' to refer to the person/people responsible for providing  
GNUstep with a distribution ... ie for a set of packages which are all  
intended to work together as part of an entire system (such as Ubuntu)  
and where the 'packager' would reasonably be expected to set policy  
for all users of the system.


I think what you are suggesting is probably (usually at least)  
undesirable ... a person providing a single package of their own piece  
of software should probably *not* be setting policy for the system and  
therefore should not be setting global defaults.


However, for the scenario you are suggesting the answer is still  
pretty much the same ... the packager could do it the same way as with  
most other software ... edit the file using standard unix tools such  
as sed and awk.   Of course, we could provide specific utilities like  
plmerge, but 'standard' unix techniques of marking sections of the  
file with comments and removing/inserting stuff between those comments  
would work just fine.




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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


On 8 Oct 2009, at 12:22, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

You are right, I did misunderstand ... I understood the term  
'packager' to refer to the person/people responsible for providing  
GNUstep with a distribution ... ie for a set of packages which are  
all intended to work together as part of an entire system (such as  
Ubuntu) and where the 'packager' would reasonably be expected to set  
policy for all users of the system.


On most systems I've looked at, the same person is responsible for  
maintaining the core GNUstep packages and a number of application /  
bundle packages.


I think what you are suggesting is probably (usually at least)  
undesirable ... a person providing a single package of their own  
piece of software should probably *not* be setting policy for the  
system and therefore should not be setting global defaults.


Not at all.  If a person installs a theme, for example, or something  
like WildMenus then it is generally understood that they will want to  
use it.  If this person is installing it systemwide, then it is  
generally understood that they will want to use it for all users.  If  
you install any systemwide GNUstep bundle then the package should  
enable it by default for all users.


I am not talking about someone installing a bundle in their home  
directory after compiling from source, I am talking about someone  
installing a package.  Someone wanting to install a GNUstep-based  
environment will typically just select a metapackage in their package  
manager and install everything (GNUstep core, bundles, frameworks, and  
apps) in one blob; they should not then be expected to configure  
things by hand, and they especially should not be expected to  
configure things by hand per user.


However, for the scenario you are suggesting the answer is still  
pretty much the same ... the packager could do it the same way as  
with most other software ... edit the file using standard unix tools  
such as sed and awk.   Of course, we could provide specific  
utilities like plmerge, but 'standard' unix techniques of marking  
sections of the file with comments and removing/inserting stuff  
between those comments would work just fine.



Adding an entry to a dictionary that may or may not already exist in a  
plist file is... nontrivial with sed / awk. You will note that other  
software these days generally does not modify files like this.   
Instead, they provide a configuration directory.  A good example is  
Apache, where various modules are generally installed as separate  
packages.  In the bad old days, things worked exactly as you  
describe.  Packages modified the configuration file, and if you were  
lucky installing or removing a module package would not trash your  
httpd.conf (although good luck if you ever tried to upgrade a module  
package).  Now, each module installs a separate configuration file.


I used the appkit user bundles as an example, but this problem equally  
applies to any app that supports plugins which might be distributed in  
separate packages.


David

-- Sent from my brain



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Terminal Services (was: Rec: Changes I've been thinking of...)

2009-10-08 Thread Wolfgang Lux


Philippe Roussel wrote:


On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 02:08:35AM +0200, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
There are multiple terminal applications (gap, backbone,  
etoile ?) but

none really usable (to my knowledge, maybe I missed something).


These are harsh words? I don't know of etoile, but the one in GAP  
works.

I use it every single day! It may miss some features but works. ANd I
assume backbone's does too, the code bae is essentially the same, but
the philosophies about releases, makefiles etc. differ.


Ok, I went too far, Terminal works. But I doesn't answer to
'Terminal/Open shell here' service needed by GWorkspace for example.


The services do work. However, you first must change one of the services
in Terminal's preferences or add a new one before Terminal will save the
necessary file to $GNUSTEP_USER_HOME/Library/Services. It took me a  
while

until I found that out.

Probably I should file a bug report, but it is not clear to me  
whether to
file this bug report at Backbone or at GAP (plus I'm a bit too busy  
at the

moment ...)

Wolfgang



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 8 Oct 2009, at 12:46, David Chisnall wrote:


On 8 Oct 2009, at 12:22, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

You are right, I did misunderstand ... I understood the term  
'packager' to refer to the person/people responsible for providing  
GNUstep with a distribution ... ie for a set of packages which are  
all intended to work together as part of an entire system (such as  
Ubuntu) and where the 'packager' would reasonably be expected to  
set policy for all users of the system.


On most systems I've looked at, the same person is responsible for  
maintaining the core GNUstep packages and a number of application /  
bundle packages.


Yes ... that's what I was thinking of.

I think what you are suggesting is probably (usually at least)  
undesirable ... a person providing a single package of their own  
piece of software should probably *not* be setting policy for the  
system and therefore should not be setting global defaults.


Not at all.  If a person installs a theme, for example, or something  
like WildMenus then it is generally understood that they will want  
to use it.  If this person is installing it systemwide, then it is  
generally understood that they will want to use it for all users.   
If you install any systemwide GNUstep bundle then the package should  
enable it by default for all users.


I am not talking about someone installing a bundle in their home  
directory after compiling from source, I am talking about someone  
installing a package.  Someone wanting to install a GNUstep-based  
environment will typically just select a metapackage in their  
package manager and install everything (GNUstep core, bundles,  
frameworks, and apps) in one blob; they should not then be expected  
to configure things by hand, and they especially should not be  
expected to configure things by hand per user.


OK ... we just have different perceptions here then.  In those  
circumstances I expect a package to be *available* to all users, but  
NOT to be automatically forced on them.
Certainly *I* don't want to have something like that imposed on *ME*  
just because someone else installs a package globally.
That's what I mean about 'policy' ... I don't mind policy being set by  
the person who managed the distribution (I wouldn't be using the  
distribution if I didn't think its managers policy was a good one),  
but I would hate to have it set just because someone else sharing the  
system with me decides to install a package  and make it available to  
me.
We can probably agree to differ on this ...it's not really very  
relevant.


However, for the scenario you are suggesting the answer is still  
pretty much the same ... the packager could do it the same way as  
with most other software ... edit the file using standard unix  
tools such as sed and awk.   Of course, we could provide specific  
utilities like plmerge, but 'standard' unix techniques of marking  
sections of the file with comments and removing/inserting stuff  
between those comments would work just fine.


Adding an entry to a dictionary that may or may not already exist in  
a plist file is... nontrivial with sed / awk. You will note that  
other software these days generally does not modify files like  
this.  Instead, they provide a configuration directory.  A good  
example is Apache, where various modules are generally installed as  
separate packages.  In the bad old days, things worked exactly as  
you describe.  Packages modified the configuration file, and if you  
were lucky installing or removing a module package would not trash  
your httpd.conf (although good luck if you ever tried to upgrade a  
module package).  Now, each module installs a separate configuration  
file.



Well I really don't see your problem ... It *is* trivially easy for  
someone familiar with unix tools (awk in particular)  to add entries  
to a property list using those tools, especially if you (as the  
package manager) control what's in there anyway.
If you don't happen to like doing it that way (I tend to agree with  
you there, but I gave the sed/awk example as the method most  
frequently used historically), you can use the mechanism in the  
example you gave yourself (from apache) and just build the plist by  
merging plists from the installed packages (in which case you handle  
uninstall by uninstalling your package and rebuilding the global  
defaults plist from the remaining installed packages with plmerge).


Either way, my point remains the same ... it's up to the packaging  
systems used by the distribution how they do things, the task is much  
the same as with any other software, not a GNUstep specific issue, and  
it's really not our concern how packagers for different distributions  
do things.  If you are putting together a package for Debian, you ask  
the Debian maintainers how they want things done rather than asking  
the developers.  We can certainly give advice, but it's not our job to  
dictate this.

Re: Terminal Services (was: Rec: Changes I've been thinking of...)

2009-10-08 Thread Philippe Roussel

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 02:10:31PM +0200, Wolfgang Lux wrote:
 The services do work. However, you first must change one of the services
 in Terminal's preferences or add a new one before Terminal will save the
 necessary file to $GNUSTEP_USER_HOME/Library/Services. It took me a  
 while
 until I found that out.

 Probably I should file a bug report, but it is not clear to me whether to
 file this bug report at Backbone or at GAP (plus I'm a bit too busy at 
 the
 moment ...)

Thanks Wolfgang, it did the trick ! This makes Terminal a lot more
useful for me.

Philippe
-- 
The box said Windows XP or better, so I installed Linux



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...


On 8 Oct 2009, at 13:30, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:

it's up to the packaging systems used by the distribution how they  
do things, the task is much the same as with any other software, not  
a GNUstep specific issue, and it's really not our concern how  
packagers for different distributions do things.



I think this reinforces my original point.  GNUstep, at the moment, is  
not friendly towards packagers.  FreeBSD is about the only platform  
that has well-maintained up-to-date GNUstep packages (and, here, I  
include stuff built on top of GNUstep), although a few Linux distros  
have recently started updating their old GNUstep packages, so that may  
change soon.


It is not our concern how packagers choose to distribute things, but  
it should be our concern to make things easy for packagers.   
Currently, it is not, and the result is that people interested in  
developing with GNUstep find that they have no recent GNUstep package  
for their distribution of choice and then give up.


You are right that this is not a GNUstep-specific issue.  It is an  
issue that all software faces and successful projects tend to be the  
ones that make life easy for packagers.


At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good GNUstep is if it's  
too much effort for people to install, because they simply won't ever  
try it.


David

-- Sent from my STANTEC-ZEBRA



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RE: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-08 Thread T.J. Yang

 Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2009 15:24:01 -0400
 From: greg.casame...@gmail.com
 To: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org; gnustep-...@gnu.org
 CC:
 Subject: Changes I've been thinking of...

 Guys,

 There are a number of things which need to change on the project:

 We need to:
 1) improve our website. It's been the same for years and doesn't
 reflect our progress.

For item 1, I like to suggest move the web site over to sourceforge.net.
If advertisement on web page is a concern/annoying, we can use Trac like 
software
to host GNUStep site. Trac can even support auto-build feature(bitten).
Check out http://trac.edgewall.org yourself.

 2) improve GNUstep's default theme as well as theming in general.
 While I know some people will respond negatively to changing the
 default theme from a NeXT-like look to something more modern, I
 believe it's one way for us to spark interest in the project is to
 update it's look. The current look should always be available, but
 not necessarily the default.
 3) Improve our ability to market ourselves in general.

To me theme is not an important issue, issue is GNUStep community is not as 
active as other projects. Apache,Firefox,extjs just to name a few.

Also there is no killer app in GNUStep. 

All the software people need is on Windows, GNOME or KDE.

I like to suggest we come up with a killer app to 
demonstrate GNUStep's write once run everywhere feature.

If GNUStep have a killer app, people will install GNUStep system on their OS.

Pick a most used software(maybe FireFox ?) and port the source code into objc 
language and GNUStep framework. 

tj yang, a GNUStep lurker

 One thing that GNUstep has been lacking in is marketing. I've been
 trying to improve things on that front, but I'm not the best marketer
 to say the very least.

 Does anyone have any questions or comments regarding this? I would
 like to hear any and all input people have.

 Later, GC
 --
 Gregory Casamento
 Open Logic Corporation, Principal Consultant
 yahoo/skype: greg_casamento, aol: gjcasa
 (240)274-9630 (Cell)

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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 7 Oct 2009, at 22:12, ici...@mail.cg.tuwien.ac.at wrote:


Hi!


1) improve our website.  It's been the same for years and doesn't
reflect our progress.


IMHO the GNUstep wiki main page currently is more informative than  
the plain www.gnustep.org front page. The wiki does a good job of  
showing project progress, too.


While I think the wiki is a good idea, it's not a substitute for an  
official project page, which needs to say:


- This project is alive.
- This project is shiny.
- This project is actively used by some people.

Currently the site says to me:

- This project was alive once.
- It's based on a thing people thought was shiny once.


2) improve GNUstep's default theme as well as theming in general.
While I know some people will respond negatively to changing the
default theme from a NeXT-like look to something more modern, I
believe it's one way for us to spark interest in the project is to
update it's look.   The current look should always be available, but
not necessarily the default.


As much as I love GNUstep base, I do not like GNUstep gui. Don't get  
me wrong, I still burst in tears of agony if I have to use another  
GUI library than GNUstep gui, because everyone still treats GUI as  
code, even C# and WindowsForms. GNUstep gui still lacks in  
polishing. Using a graphical GNUstep application on Gnome/KDE/Xfce  
ist still a pain because:


I don't completely disagree here.  I think -gui has improved a huge  
amount in the last year, mostly due to Fred's work.  Nicolas, Fred and  
Quentin worked a bit on live resizing at the Étoilé hackathon, which  
makes things look a lot more modern.  Things are still slower than  
they should be and we need to do some profiling to work out why that is.


There are also some plainly embarrassing bugs, like the fact that  
underlining still doesn't work.  Much of the text system code is in  
need of an overhaul, because it's currently a mess of premature  
optimisation that none of the current developers actually understands.


Another issue is code quality. For example, the code in GNUstep back  
is one hell of an ugly mess. I had to touch it, but I felt a chill  
running down my spine in doing so. Everything in XGServerEvent and  
associates looks like a mass of hacks piled on top of each other.  
It's such a chaos, I do not want to touch it anymore in fear of  
breaking somthing completely unrelated.


Back also frightens me.  At the hackathon, I talked to Fred a bit  
about refactoring it so that, long term, all that -back will do is  
create drawing contexts and handle events.  We will then use a  
CoreGraphics implementation, probably based on Opal (which was just  
copyright assigned to GNUstep, I believe) to handle drawing using  
Cairo.  This would let us use the same drawing code on X11, Win32 and  
on any of the other platforms Cairo supports (e.g. Zeta, OS/2,  
DirectFB), with just a small amount of new code for turning the  
platform's native events into NSEvents and for calling the cairo  
functions for creating graphics contexts.


Additionally I really dislike the coding style, not because it's not  
mine, but because it fails to make the code more readable. On the  
other hand, there was code by Fred which looked really ok, so maybe  
it's just about using the coding style in a sane way All I  
wanted to say is, that it's not that easy to start hacking inside  
the GNUstep core libraries.


Completely agree.  Good coding conventions are picked because they  
make things that are wrong look wrong or generate compiler errors /  
warnings.  The GNU coding conventions were picked by selecting at  
random various bits from all existing coding conventions in the hope  
that that would make everyone happy.  They are a horrible mash of  
things.  The indenting style is horrible, for example, and only works  
if you have your editor set up in exactly the same way as RMS; mixing  
tabs and spaces for indenting is one of the most stupid ideas I've  
ever seen.  The convention of putting a space after function names and  
before the open bracket makes code harder to read because it makes it  
difficult to tell without reading the context that something is an  
argument list rather than a subexpression.  In fact, almost everything  
about the GNU coding conventions looks painfully stupid to anyone with  
a basic understanding of how the human visual system works, but as an  
official GNU project we are stuck with it.


When we designed the Étoilé coding standards, we made sure that every  
one of our style guidelines could be justified.  Given the number of  
novice contributors who have contributed changes to core parts of  
Étoilé, I'd say they work well.  Unfortunately, every time I submit a  
diff in a sane coding style, someone goes and reformats it in GNU  
style.  I even find my own code difficult to read when it's been  
reformatted in the GNUstep style, so it's not surprising other people  
find it difficult.



3) Improve

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-08 Thread Nicola Pero


 It would undoubtedly be good to have some packager-specific  
 documentation, but obviously the target readership is a very small  
 group 

We *do* have packager documentation, in 

 core/make/README.Packaging

Feel free to add a short section about what was discussed here. :-)


 - How does this allow a packager to install and remove defaults as  
 part of package installation / uninstallation?  Presumably you can  
 use plmerge to install them (again, is this documented anywhere?),  
 but how do you uninstall them?

I agree with Richard's later suggestion that the package system might deal with 
that
by having a directory where each package installs a .plist upon installation, 
and removes
it upon deinstallation.  At the end of each package 
installation/deinstallation, the
package scripts could do a plmerge so that all the currently existing .plists 
in the 
directory are plmerged to create the global default plist, which is hence kept 
up-to-date. :-)

That said, it should probably be used with restrain ;-)

Presumably you have a specific example in mind where it makes particular sense 
(Etoile ?); but 
in general, I personally don't see a reason why installing a package should 
change some system defaults.  
Installing a package doesn't necessarily mean enabling it.

Eg, I could be installing 10 or 20 themes or other GNUstep GUI-changing 
bundles, but that doesn't mean
every theme that is installed must be trying to force all users to switch to 
it.  I'd expect to have
a Preferences panel somewhere where I can change my own user defaults and 
activate/deactivate the bundles
or themes I want/don't want.  Different users might activate/deactivate 
different bundles.

So I think it is more important to have a very good preference application that 
allow real users
to configure their environment to suit their needs, including turning on/off 
bundles or extensions. :-)

Thanks



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-08 Thread icicle


Hi!


While I think the wiki is a good idea, it's not a substitute for an
official project page, which needs to say:

- This project is alive.
- This project is shiny.
- This project is actively used by some people.


I'm with you there :)


As much as I love GNUstep base, I do not like GNUstep gui. Don't get
 me wrong, I still burst in tears of agony if I have to use another
GUI library than GNUstep gui, because everyone still treats GUI as
code, even C# and WindowsForms. GNUstep gui still lacks in
polishing. Using a graphical GNUstep application on Gnome/KDE/Xfce
ist still a pain because:


I don't completely disagree here.  I think -gui has improved a huge
amount in the last year, mostly due to Fred's work.  Nicolas, Fred
and  Quentin worked a bit on live resizing at the Étoilé hackathon,
which  makes things look a lot more modern.  Things are still slower
than  they should be and we need to do some profiling to work out why
that is.


Currently I don't work that much with gui, all I need is a window with
an OpenGL context and in some cases an additional window with some
settings. I am still using the art backend as I had issues with cairo
(window and contents didn't display correctly, black polygons all over
the place), but I am still using Ubuntu 8.04, so maybe the cairo
package is rather outdated.

What comes to my mind regarding GNUstep applications is that for a long
time now my perception is that Gorm is the only serious GNUstep
application. It works, it does it's job and it is maintained. No other
GNUstep application fulfilling those criteria comes to my mind.



There are also some plainly embarrassing bugs, like the fact that
underlining still doesn't work.  Much of the text system code is in
need of an overhaul, because it's currently a mess of premature
optimisation that none of the current developers actually understands.


Ouch.




Another issue is code quality. For example, the code in GNUstep back
 is one hell of an ugly mess. I had to touch it, but I felt a chill
running down my spine in doing so. Everything in XGServerEvent and
associates looks like a mass of hacks piled on top of each other.
It's such a chaos, I do not want to touch it anymore in fear of
breaking somthing completely unrelated.


Back also frightens me.  At the hackathon, I talked to Fred a bit
about refactoring it so that, long term, all that -back will do is
create drawing contexts and handle events.  We will then use a
CoreGraphics implementation, probably based on Opal (which was just
copyright assigned to GNUstep, I believe) to handle drawing using
Cairo.  This would let us use the same drawing code on X11, Win32 and
 on any of the other platforms Cairo supports (e.g. Zeta, OS/2,
DirectFB), with just a small amount of new code for turning the
platform's native events into NSEvents and for calling the cairo
functions for creating graphics contexts.


Sounds reasonable :)


Additionally I really dislike the coding style, not because it's not
 mine, but because it fails to make the code more readable. On the
other hand, there was code by Fred which looked really ok, so maybe
it's just about using the coding style in a sane way All I
wanted to say is, that it's not that easy to start hacking inside
the GNUstep core libraries.


Completely agree.  Good coding conventions are picked because they
make things that are wrong look wrong or generate compiler errors /
warnings.  The GNU coding conventions were picked by selecting at
random various bits from all existing coding conventions in the hope
that that would make everyone happy.  They are a horrible mash of
things.  The indenting style is horrible, for example, and only works
 if you have your editor set up in exactly the same way as RMS;
mixing  tabs and spaces for indenting is one of the most stupid ideas
I've  ever seen.  The convention of putting a space after function
names and  before the open bracket makes code harder to read because
it makes it  difficult to tell without reading the context that
something is an  argument list rather than a subexpression.  In fact,
almost everything  about the GNU coding conventions looks painfully
stupid to anyone with  a basic understanding of how the human visual
system works, but as an  official GNU project we are stuck with it.


I didn't know you have to stick to the GNU coding guidelines if you are
an official GNU project. Now I understand all the people complaining
about gcc being unreadable...


3) Improve our ability to market ourselves in general.

Yep. IMHO Distributed Objects alone is one hell of a feature, making
 it worth to use Foundation just because of that.


Yup, DBUS is a horribly hacky clone of DO and people seem to get
excited about it.  DO could be a killer feature, if more people were
aware of it.


I do love Foundation because it provides me with a lot of stuff which I
need every day. I do not have to care about strings, I do not have to
care about file management, all the containers are pretty

Re: Changes I've been thinking of...



On 8 Oct 2009, at 16:45, Nicola Pero wrote:




It would undoubtedly be good to have some packager-specific
documentation, but obviously the target readership is a very small
group 


We *do* have packager documentation, in

core/make/README.Packaging


Yes, but I was meaning on the website ...  Maybe it would be enough to  
copy that file onto the website and link to it?



Feel free to add a short section about what was discussed here. :-)


OK.



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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

2009-10-08 Thread Matt Rice

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 5:30 AM, Richard Frith-Macdonald
rich...@tiptree.demon.co.uk wrote:

 OK ... we just have different perceptions here then.  In those circumstances
 I expect a package to be *available* to all users, but NOT to be
 automatically forced on them.
 Certainly *I* don't want to have something like that imposed on *ME* just
 because someone else installs a package globally.

there is no enforcing here,

people could easily set

defaults write NSGlobalDomain GSAppKitUserBundles '()'

to get no theme bundles, I do this e.g. for using themes in every
application except Gorm
It just pushes the burden of setting defaults onto those that don't
want to follow the global installation
instead of those that do, I am completely fine with installing
defaults system wide
(as long as the system domain doesn't override the global domain)


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Re: Changes I've been thinking of...