Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

when reading other people "rants". I do think that you have feelings and 
are expressing them. However, the concept of "which direction" to take 
is again something persona. You feel you want more "Apple friendliness" 
with respect to Cocoa and iOS.

I feel frustrated because I envision a different direction for gnustep 
and in the past years, some "holes" are still there, while even other 
people made other changes.

Take a step back. The way you write (and many others) is that by wishing 
something people will do that.

Think differently.

Do you want an UIKit implementation? Fine. You may ask, somebody might 
help you. You amy want to do it yourself. Start working for it. When you 
have something working, ask if it can go to the repository.
Has that been denied to you? I don't think so.
Is GNUstep.org as a project holding you back?

We have corebase, we have xlib, art, win32, cairo backends. For minor 
things we have a lot of configure options, you can decide which graphic 
formats to support!

Take this example:

Think about SmallWebKit, SWK. A lot of people voiced for an HTML 
solution. Nobody ever moved a finger to do it. Nobody agreed on HOW to 
do it. Many people call a pure objective-c implementation.
Yet, it is hosted inside gnustep.org. DO you want it? you can try to use 
it, report bugs, contribute it. You can join the semi-regular and 
informal developer meetings we try to have with Nikolaus and Fred about it.

GNUstep incorporated it, it hurts nobody for it to be there. WIll it go 
anywhere? I don't know. But it is and was fun and helped to find a n 
incredible amount of bugs and limitation in gnustep base and gui!!! And 
there still are!

A lot of people voice "we want a real WebKit port" . Well, nobody is 
stopping them to do that, or? Of course, just asking is not enough.

Sometimes asking motivates other people, maybe they share the same idea 
and get in touch with you.


Ivan Vučica wrote:
> On Thu Dec 19 2013 at 9:17:57 PM, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller 
> <hns@goldelico.com <mailto:hns@goldelico.com>> wrote:
>
>     The key problem IMHO is that GNUstep is missing leadership.
>     Someone thinking
>     about AND defining the overall direction of the project *)
>
>     So if not one person is standing up an saying "go there", we need
>     some other
>     means. E.g. a democratic one. Like an opinion poll and majority
>     votes. Or we
>     do a vote to empower a trustworthy person to define the overall
>     directions for
>     e.g. one year.
I don't think this will get us nowhere. Remember, democracy is the 
system who has the power to make the majority of people unhappy.
Suppose we have 3 directions.. equally represented by 33% of the 
developers. If you decide one has to be followed, you are displeasing 
2/3rds of the persons. Most probably they will leave.

You will end with a very small project, boring for most people which 
will loose diversity, portability and fun for the sake of a certain 
"business goal". there are a lots of projects which rose that way, got 
famous and then died again.

Adding a new library to a project is not a problem. Of course, if 
something changes the "core" and affects more people, then it needs to 
be discussed (e.g. integrating something that becomes a hard dependency, 
removal of support of something, etc) else, bundles, libraries, apps 
just live their own life.
> Gregory can't come and simply order (e.g.) Fred to work on a UIKit 
> implementation. He can gently nudge in that direction, if Fred feels 
> like working on it already.
Right. You can voice for that. Leading is best done by starting it yourself.
> But that's something really hard to do remotely, in a controlled 
> fashion. That's something really hard to do when everyone has 'real 
> lives', interests, friends, pubs to visit, restaurants to consume, 
> etc., and there's only a small number of people even working on the 
> project.
+1
> Note that those were small things, small grievances we had. To go 
> further down the road to "OS X and iOS friendliness", if we want to 
> distribute an effort, we need to divide things into smaller chunks 
> that people can resolve over weekends, list them, and see who picks up 
> what. Small things people can do quickly.
A bit of this is true, even with very diverse goals, there are some 
common parts that needs to be solved and implemented. Yet this is often 
forgotten for the sake of doing something more fun! (I think of the many 
open bugs).
> That may be a way to steer more people in a single direction. Define 
> it, chop it up, offer small tasks for consumption. And if more people 
> manage to work on this as part of their day job, school projects, 
> etc., maybe we can move along.
That's not the open-source spirit. One part of the "cathedral" vs. 
"bazaar" discussion.

Often, we have this incredibly long threads in public or we discuss in 
private. We see the differences while we fail to recognize that solving 
bug X or fixing bug Y would benefit several "gnustep directions"... We 
fail to recognize the common work needed.

Riccardo