Re: GNUstep roadmap (was Re: [Suggestion] GNUstep-test for quality control)

[Philippe C.D. Robert]

Hi,

On Thursday, October 23, 2003, at 09:31  Uhr, Helge Hess wrote:
> > > Yes, I see the intention of a NeXTstep remake. I would love that. 
> > > The moment GS will have a decent ProjectBuilder (including Editor, 
> > > Class-Browser and GDB integration) I will leave MOSX. For me then 
> > > just EOModeler and WebObjectsBuilder would be missing.
>
> Notably NeXTstep never had such a great ProjectBuilder, Class-Browser, 
> etc. It was always pretty much bare bones. PBX is a bit better but 
> still not comparable to "real" IDEs like Eclipse or (duck) 
> VisualStudio.

This is correct, but this has negative as well as positive aspects. Of 
course PB was not an IDE, but the entire philosophy of the system was 
similar to Unix, where many tools are intended to work together.

> So I personally think that it is possible to get with GNUstep what we 
> had with NeXTstep 3.3 or something. Yet, NeXTstep 3.3 now *is* 
> outdated. Its still a very nice system which I occasionally boot on my 
> NeXTstation, but it has no practical value anymore.

Of course it is outdated, but again its philosophy is not. Imagine 
something like NEXTSTEP based on modern technologies, I bet it would be 
very attractive :-)

> > is is one point where I do not agree. I seriously doubt that having a 
> > Windows port would have big impacts on the GS project. Windows 
> > programmers are definitely not waiting for GS and most of the current 
> > GS users are more "Unix oriented" anyway.
>
> Well ... whether Windows is important basically comes down to what the 
> "GS project" is. Philip sees GS as EOF+WO and in this case I fully 
> agree, Windows is absolutely crucial. All successful Web development 
> environment run and need to run on Windows, this is true for PHP, 
> Zope, MySQL, J2EE, etc.

But do you (both then) really believe that such a GS approach could 
compete with those already widely adopted technologies? Of course some 
would use it, but would GS as such benefit from that?

> > > But if we go directly to for the distribution, we will never have 
> > > the manpower to achieve it.
> > Does it really take that many more men to reach this goal?
> Thats an interesting point. Personally I do not think that it takes 
> *more* men to achieve GNUstep goals - on the contrary, we have quite 
> good people at GNUstep and the absolute amount of developers is IMHO 
> also sufficient. But it certainly takes more *time* to reach the goals 
> - that is, the developers would need to work fulltime on the project.

I agree...

> > Well, they did not succeed selling enough versions of OPENSTEP Mach 
> > or OPENSTEP Enterprises, also they did not attract enough 
> > programmers/companies to use their APIs, so they failed in this 
> > respect, no?!
>
> Of course. AFAIK WO as a product did never sell very well, but of 
> course a few very good consulting projects brought a very good revenue 
> on the service side. I think that this is still very true even with WO 
> being Java now.

So do you think something like GDL2+GSWeb could get into this niche? Or 
do you think it would even be able to break out of this niche?

> > The experience of NEXTSTEP, or better phrased, some parts of the 
> > philosophy which made this NEXTSTEP experience so brilliant. This 
> > includes APIs like the IndexerKit, DBKit, 3DKit plus QuickRenderMan 
> > and so on which were killed by moving to OpenStep.
>
> On the other side we got NSObject (retain counting) with OpenStep (or 
> actually with EOF 1.0 which was also available on NeXTstep 3.3), so 
> this also had some positive things on the developers side.

Of course, the move to OpenStep was good in many respects, no doubt.

cheers,

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip