Hi, I'm back

[David Lázaro Saz]

Hi there,

I'm back.  After five odd years away from GNUstep development I can  
return contributing again.  My circumstances have changed a lot,  
obviously, from the beginnings of 2000.  I'm older and all that.   
I've been a professional developer all this years, mainly in  
commercial/proprietary code bases.

I've been reading the list archives to get a feeling of where are the  
things now.  I grinned all the way through the recent conversation  
about why GNUstep is not sexy for Mac OS X developers.  I've been  
there but after some reflection I feel a need, both personal and  
professional, to get some things finished in GNUstep.  A solid,  
stable and out-of-beta gnustep would be too much of a good thing to  
pass on.

Now, my interests.  I've developed a commercial Mac OS X/OpenStep  
application for my work and would like to stop developing with the  
old OPENSTEP Enterprise for Windows and begin using GNUstep for our  
Windows port.  I know GNUstep is not there yet and that is where I  
think that I could be helpful, with my knowledge of the Windows APIs  
and the UNIX and Cocoa/OS on the other side.

I have personal goals for this porting effort that could be at odds  
with the current design of the GNUstep GUI library and parts of  
foundation so I'd like to discuss my ideas with the people that are  
now actively in charge of the Windows parts of the code.  Drop me a  
message and I'll tell you what are my impressions or contact me  
through AIM at this e-mail address (my time zone is GMT+1, Europe/ 
Madrid, mind you).

Adding a little bit of detail to the picture, the main goal is for  
this app to be completely integrated with the Windows look and feel.   
I've developed some tests libraries in a variety of languages: C, C+ 
+, Ruby bindings, you name it.  The end result is that there are some  
things that I didn't think that could be done that are, well, doable  
and working on Windows.  Things like activating XP theme support from  
a DLL dynamically that I haven't seen done on other GUI libraries.   
That was developed some months ago.

Then I looked into how that could be integrated in our current apps.   
Looked through the active cross platform, open source, toolkit  
efforts without success.  After everything has been examined and  
reexamined I think that the easiest path, taking into account my  
experience, is to get the GNUstep code base and bend it as needed to  
accept this.  That way I will get what I need and maybe other people  
can put that to good use, too.

My main desktop/personal OS is OS X now and I've got a machine  
available that boots to NEXTSTEP 3.3 so if someone needs something  
related to that (testing, some questions answered, screenshots, for  
example) drop me a line too.

Finally, although I've got all the papers signed for copyright  
related to GNUstep, I'd rather wait until I feel the time is right to  
ask for commit access again (this one is obvious, I know).  Hope this  
diatribe didn't end up too long and too boring.

Cheers,

David.