Re: Known MacOS programmer about WO/EOF

[Helge Hess]

On Mar 30, 2005, at 3:52, Nicolas Roard wrote:
> But in all fairness, it's not very difficult to install on linux -- at 
> least on debian..

Which leaves you with Fedora, SuSE, RedHat, Gentoo, etc, all in 
different versions and setups. Also: yum and apt4rpm support are a must 
if an app depends on a dozen of other packages.
Debian is (unfortunately) only a very small fraction of the Linux space.


I've just tried on Debian Sid. Installation is very easy, I did an 
"apt-get install projectcenter" and got /usr/bin/ProjectCenter. Very 
nice.

But: actually we access all our Linux machines using X11 from OSX 
desktops, and so do I. Guess what? It doesn't work at all. I get a 
white menu and a lot of warnings in the shell [BadImplementation 
(server does not implement operation)].
Before anyone blames Apple X11: I have no such issues with any other 
X11 app I'm using, KDE, OOo, Mozilla, Xemacs etc - all working 
perfectly fine. I suppose GS misses fallbacks for some X11 extensions 
it does use.

Summary for _me_: GNUstep not usable on my Linux servers :-( Check 
again in 12 months.

> On windows, with the recent installers, it's as easy.

No offense intended, but the last installer I tried didn't install me a 
system which allowed me to compile even a very simple library from SOPE 
which has no dependencies.

Summary for me: very good progress, but not yet usable. Check again in 
3-6 months.

> That leaves us with OSX..
> effectively here it could be neat to have a dmg containing everything 
> :-)

I don't think that running gstep-base/gui on MacOSX is very important. 
Its just a nice to have to ensure that code is working on both 
Foundation's.
IMHO it would be more important to have more GNUstep apps running on 
top of Cocoa. Do not promise X-platform between Cocoa/Linux, 
demonstrate it! Eg having Gorm and ProjectCenter as Cocoa apps would be 
quite interesting.


To change the impression on the state of GS IMHO one should first make 
it easily installable on the various mainstream Linux distributions 
(_at least_ the latest Fedora and SuSE) instead of just Debian.

Then I recommend to fix it wrt Apple X11, I'm pretty sure this kind of 
setup is very common for Apple guys trying to evaluate GNUstep. In the 
same run Windows X11 servers like Exceed should be checked. Same reason 
(I very well remember having reported Exceed issues some 6 or 7 years 
ago ...).

Finally having a working Windows installer would be awesome and IMHO 
really has the potential to get Cocoa developers on the boat. Maybe 
with Nicola working on it GS will be there soon :-)

Greets,
  Helge
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