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

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Austin Clow wrote:
> SORRY I FORGOT TO REPLY TO ALL
>
> I like using GNUstep because it feels like NeXTSTEP/OpenSTEP, so I 
> want to see GNUstep as an actual desktop. Not as something that runs 
> on top of another desktop. I feel like that should be the primary 
> focus, and then all the hooks for running on top of Windows, Unity, or 
> w.e should be secondary
That's a good goal and a good start! It matches that of several other 
people... and it is not the goal of others though.
> So, I wish GNUstep was a distribution of its own. It might be 
> psychological, but I feel it is more often than not treated as an 
> add-on. And I understand that it is because there is no native GNUstep 
> web-browser, no document editing software, et cetera. So one can not 
> simply use GNUstep as a desktop just yet.
Well, many linux distributions support "Kde" "Gnome" "Xfce"... one is a 
preferred citizen, but there is no need to make a "gnome-debian" or 
"gnome-kde". Of course there is Ubuntu and Kubuntu... so many have your 
feelings with different environments.

Having our own distribution is a lot of work I don't think gnustep.org 
should support itself, however a separate project making that (Sidestep 
existed) would always be welcome and it would need to interact with 
other projects.

Then of course, such distribution might "distort"t hings, since it would 
be possibly our presentation. We had somebody packaking a LiveCD. It was 
a very nice and welcomed idea, but during the different releases, the 
choice in packages and way of configuring was very peculiar and strange 
which led to it being more a bad publicity than a good one.

Sometimes it is better not to have something than to have something bad. 
(This is also your experience with guides, it adds to frustration).
> I spent the last 3 years working on my own IDE for Mac OS X (and 
> programming language) that I have always intended to be ported to 
> GNUstep. But it is a NO-GO. Because I spend more time trying to figure 
> out how to get Clang, ObjC 2, and Cairo to work (by setting arguments 
> and what not) — Which are absolutely required for what I am doing. I 
> rèad there is support for ARC, but I haven't even started to 
> investigate it on GNUstep. I feel like it is too much of a chore to 
> figure out how to get it going. The Wiki should be cleaned up. Or just 
> deleted and started form scratch. I am tired of the instructions that 
> do not work, sometimes they just make me feel stupid.
>
> The non Clang/ObjC2 configurations should be dropped. (MY OPINION)
I disagree strongly here, but also I don't understand what is your 
issue. I have different installation of both plain gcc and Clang/Objc2 
and I don't find clang more difficult, except for the fact that I had to 
updated the clang installer and install obj-c2 myself from source (not 
exactly user-friendly, but it works).
I hope that in the future, Clang and Obj-2 library will be ready 
packaged as a binary in your favourite distribution and if that is 
given, installing one or the other flavour is really trivial!

If not, I think you need to report back.
> I haven't installed GNUstep from scratch in about three weeks - a 
> month or so, and I haven't been following as closely as I used to. For 
> all I know these issues have been solved. It really is about 
> advertisement.
>
> As for what other people dream… I guess it is that GNUstep can run on 
> everything — including Windows.
I like that feeling... when I have my app running on Mac, Linux, BSD and 
Windows :)
> I am sure that people are reading this going: It is not that bad, I 
> get it running all the time. It works fine. So I've kept out of it. 
> What is easy for others is sometimes daunting for me.
It is not that bad... right but for some it is easier than other apparently.

Sometimes writing about success is nice, people are quick in writing 
about problems, not success!

Riccardo