RE: attracting software developers

[Andy Satori]

That and tools that work.

Not to be offensive, that's not my intent, but I was recently looking at
using GnuStep as an avenue to be able to use some of my Cocoa tools at work
via GnuStep.  I tried installing the dev environment on windows.  It
installs, and GORM builds and is excellent.  Of course, unless you are a
GnuStep makefile guru, it's not terribly easy, or approachable to do 
development.

Further exacerbating the issue is that the installation process on Linux is 
absolutely no better.  For example, I have a SUSE 9.1 box behind me. 
Installed WM, GNuStep Startup, built GORM (it won't actually run, some problem 
with gdomap that I haven't taken the time to resolve.  Project Center won't 
build on the box, it's apparently missing a dependancy, though it's not well 
reflected.  Project Center won't build on Windows at all, eaxcerbating the 
issue is that the platform it's most like, it requires quite a bit of effort 
to get things working there, and that's on OS X.

In short, while GNUStep has a serious cool factor, it's current installation 
and dev tool process is arcane at best, unusable at worst and generally not 
friendly to a new or casual developer using it, and attracting these people is 
easy, retaining them is not, and when the tools are in the state that they are 
currently in...  Well, I hope you get the picture.

Andy

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-gnustep-bounces+dru=satori-assoc.com@gnu.org
[mailto:discuss-gnustep-bounces+dru=satori-assoc.com@gnu.org] On Behalf Of
hns@computer.org
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 9:00 AM
To: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
Subject: Re: attracting software developers

Paraplegic Racehorse schrieb:

> The abandonment of old, great software products after Apple allowed
> the API to languish for, what, five years? can have done nothing good
> for

Why do you think so? Look at
http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev and see how active it is.

> GNUstep. How can we get the few remaining developers to support GNUstep?

I would not say there are a few remaining developers to support the Apple
API... IMHO their number is even growing. But there are only a few on
GNUstep.

IMHO, GNUstep needs a clear perspective, e.g. platform indepencence while
99,95% compatible to the latest Cocoa additions...

Currently, I would say its support is for Linux mostly, some Windows - and
one Handheld Linux PDA (Zaurus).

And perhaps a complete distribution (incl. some underlaying OS) with an
interesting application suite. Zero effort installation. Boots directly from
CD. Similar to Knoppix or Zeta.

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