Re: [FOSDEM] Desktops DevRoom 2016: Call for Participation

[David Chisnall]

On 1 Dec 2015, at 07:09, H. Nikolaus Schaller <hns@goldelico.com> wrote:
> 
> Wouldn't that be something to get a bigger audience to GNUstep?

We’ve had a GNUstep devroom a few years, but it’s largely been ignored by 
people other than regular GNUstep contributors.  It would probably be better to 
focus on getting talks in other DevRooms.  A lot of people just sit in the room 
that they were in last time if they haven’t got anywhere particular that they 
want to go to (and Brussels is usually very cold that time of year!), so 
there’s a good chance of some more exposure.

That said, I gave a main track talk about GNUstep that had a few hundred people 
in the audience a few years ago and didn’t see much by way of increased 
participation.  Partly, I suspect, because people looked at the web site, tried 
to install packages on their favourite OS, and it put them off further 
involvement.

This is partly why I’ve tried to make the FreeBSD packages a reference example 
of how to package GNUstep (modern ObjC environment, things like ARC working out 
of the box).  It ought to be relatively easy to copy them for other platforms, 
assuming that someone can convince the Debian clang package maintainer not to 
force clang to depend on the GCC Objective-C runtime (using GNUstep on 
Debian/Ubuntu is painful because you have to force-uninstall a package that 
keeps trying to reinstall itself to get basic functionality working).

David

-- Sent from my PDP-11