Re: Comments on the website from people on twitter...

[James Carthew]

I don't think that gnustep should be aiming to reimplement the entirety of OSX/cocoa. I think that it should aim for certain core technologies which are worth copying. That said, the video pipelining of OSX is definately worth copying. The fact that with a few quartz composer compositions and some glue code you can make an application like BoinxTV is pretty compelling proof that the video technology in OSX is second to none. I'm looking to replace a $30,000 video mixer using just a single Mac Pro tower with two video capture cards. It's the combination of hardware offloading of the video API (actually using all 8-12 CPU cores and the video cards), and the easy video pipelining that makes it so powerful. I haven't seen anything like it for Audio on OSX, (Thinking quartz composer but for audio) I know someone was working on something similar for 3D graphics on gnustep. I think the same about NEXT's DatabaseKit. I'd like to see that finished as well.

The rest of it, the eyecandy isn't really necessary. A lot of the eyecandy in OSX can be done by compiz, or similar window management software in linux anyway. When talking about system integration you're always going to have problems. OSX has the best written driver code at kernel level I've ever seen, drivers are 30-70% smaller on osx compared to Linux for Sound at least, and PCI setup is actually readable vs Linux which is a terrible rat's nest of unreadable code, and BSD falls between the two. That said filesystem support on OSX is ridiculous, Linux easily leads here with ZFS/XFS/BTRFS options.

If you'd like a comprehensive list of applications I'd like to see in gnustep I'm happy to provide them. Basically MPD and Cynthiune should have a baby that's a music database (iTunes), GSMplayer brought upto gnome-mplayer's level (I'm trying to do this myself.) System Preferences needs actual system configuration functions (Networking/X11/Sound) TalkSoup made stable, maybe just rolled into GAP, multitabbing on the terminal (seriously managing 10 terminal windows is annoying) SSH/SCP support added to FTP.app (because server permissions are annoying to configure when SSH can be leveraged) And of course a web browser. A stretch goal for me would be to refactor GWorkspace into two apps, one being GWorkspace, and another being either a finder rip-off or a new/better browser paradigm. I'd like there to be a few different options with file open/save styles and with file browser paradigms. GWorkspace could just be refactored to remember settings a bit better such as Browser vs Viewer mode etc.

 

On 9 August 2013 16:33, Dan Hitt <dan.hitt@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 7:17 PM, Gregory Casamento
<greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
...........

> The goals of GNUstep are quite clear.  Our goal is to create an API which is
> a clone of the latest version of Cocoa and to provide the best development
> environment on as many operating systems as we can.
>
> Regarding the "Trying to support everything" question... this is actually
> not what is time consuming.  The problem mainly is that Cocoa is a moving
> target and it moves quickly.  We are 10-20 developers working part time on a
> project which has no funding and no company which formally backs it.  The
> one thing we do get is a lot of feedback and absolutely no help.   So, my
> suggestion is, if you're interested in making GNUstep easier to use and
> better on your particular platform, then join us and start doing so.

Greg,

Thanks so much for writing these two paragraphs.  They are edifying.

Now, in fact, i do benefit from GNUstep in a direct, practical way.
I use Camera.app to transfer pictures from my digital camera to
my ubuntu system, and it is the very best program for doing this,
imvho.  And it exists as a package in ubuntu, so it is easy to
install and use.

So i want to be very clear that i appreciate GNUstep, and understand
that you and the rest of the team have put a lot into it, and justifiably
are entitled to set the direction of the project.

So i will not provide you feedback about where the project should go
(although if there were a project which had the goal of creating
a gnustep distro that you could install on an empty partition
and boot into with grub, i'd be mighty interested, as i still
think NeXTstep was the high point of personal computers).

But i would like to make one observation about your goal of
tracking (making a 'clone' of) 'the latest version of Cocoa'.
As you have noted, that is hard to do because Cocoa is
a moving target.

I would say, with all due respect and appreciate for your work,
that it is not only hard to do, it is impossible to do.

Cocoa changes in part just so it cannot be cloned, and if
you ever do have close to a credible clone, you can bet it will
move some more.  It is like the 'large bright thing that
looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box,
and was always in the shelf next above the one' Alice was
looking at (Wool and Water, in Through the Looking Glass).

But no matter what, i do appreciate your work.  (I appreciate
Alice, too!)

And if somebody does decide to make a NeXTstep-like distro,
i'll appreciate that also, and download it, and install it.

dan

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