Re: Plans for change....

[Alex Perez]

Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> All,
>
> I've written up a short list of things that I want GNUstep to accomplish in the 
> year to come:
>
> As Chief maintainer, it is up to me to determine the direction of the project.
>
> Over
> the past several years interest in GNUstep has steadily increased, but
> not nearly by enough. In order to reach a wider audience, GNUstep needs
> to do a number of things (not necessarily in priority order):
>
> 1)
> Adopt a more modern look. This includes the look of the windows, the
> color scheme and how the menus are rendered. It's okay to let that old
> gui go, it's not going to kill you to do so. ;) Users like things to
> look "good". This is entirely subjective. Personally, I think GNOME and
> KDE are quite ugly under the best of circumstances. To this end, we
> need to make integrated theming available in GNUstep and make it easy.

*does a happy-dance*

> 3)
> Eliminate the need for GNUstep.sh, either by making GNUstep place it's
> binaries and libraries in more "standard" places, or by providing an
> installation procedure

*bursts into a jig*

> 5) Focus and concentrate on one and only one
> set of display technologies per platform. We expend way too much time
> and energy on maintaining mulitple backends (xlib, art and etc) when we
> really don't have to. For Linux/BSD we have two functional backends and another 
> on the away for cairo. What's the point of this? In my opinion
> we should complete the cairo backend and deprecate BOTH the xlib and
> art backends. xlib is hopelessly outdated and libart isn't really
> supported by anyone anymore. 

That's right,let cairo do the heavy lifting for us. Way more people 
working on it than on GNUstep, so we get backends for "free" 
effectively, once we have good support for Cairo (not to mention nice 
hardware acceleration, where available)

> 6) Decide what we are. Yes,
> that's right. Some people view GNUstep as a desktop, others view
> GNUstep as a development environment. GNUstep needs to define itself as
> one or the other. The website says it's a development environment, but
> it has many aspects which fit the definition of a desktop environment.
> In truth, I believe it should be both.

It's a floor wax, AND a dessert-topping!

(for non-Americans on the list, please excuse the semi-obscure mid-70s 
Saturday Night Live reference) and/or see 
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75ishimmer.phtml

Nice to finally see some benevolent dictatorship going on! I guess it's 
tmie to make some faux-Che Guevara shirts with Greg on them ;-) 
(inspired by http://www.threadless.com/submission/101790/che_bacca )

Regards,
Alex Perez