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

[icicle]

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.

> 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:
1. it simply does not integrate with the rest of the desktop
2. lots of bugs in window handling (minimise, maximise, ordering, ...)
3. the look belongs back to the 80's

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.

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.
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.

> 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.
A modern look wouldn't hurt, too. You could talk to the Etoile people 
if you need fancy images from a GNUstep based desktop :)


My 2 cents

Cheers
TOM