Windows and GnuStep

[Andy Satori]

Ok gentlemen,

I've got a few questions and I hope they don't come across wrong.  I 
want to clarify something before I begin. Yes, I'm frustrated.

On the GnuStep Website there is this lovely link
        
http://www.gnustep.org/resources/BookClarifications.html

In which, the following is stated:

"This should read "Yes." :) GNUstep is being used commercially by a 
number of companies and is distributed regularly on Debian and Gentoo. 
GNUstep also allows a developer to compile his/her application with 
almost no changes under most UNIX operating systems. Applications which 
use Foundation (AKA GNUstep-Base) exclusively are portable to nearly any 
posix compliant OS, as well as Windows (using Cygwin or MingW). Stephen 
Kochan briefly covers how to use GNUstep under Windows in his excellent 
book, "Programming in Objective-C". A windows installer for GNUstep can 
be found at ftp://ftp.gnustep.org/pub/gnustep/binaries/windows.";

And yet, here I am after a month of casually futzing around with various 
revisions of the Windows installer, and the end results of those 
installers and I have exactly one Application from the GnuStep 
Applications page built.  Of course, it wouldn't run without manually 
building a missing dependancy, and then manually starting a program that 
apparently all GnuStep GUI applications require before running (gdomap 
IIRC).

For the record, that one app is Gorm, which candidly is only of use to 
build user interfaces, and is an excellent project.  ProjectBuilder, 
ProjectCenter, GnuMail, AddressBook all however failed, all for 
different reasons.

That clarification page goes on to extoll the virtues of camaelon to 
change the theme of GnuStep apps.  This still doesn't make them feel 
like normal Windows applications, WildMenu's would appear to help, but 
since I can't get it working either, I suppose it's a moot point.

The advice I've been given in irc and email is to try CVS, so I have, 
and things are marginally better, however, I point you to your own 
comments again in the Clarifications page:

"There are tested and released tar/gz packages of all GNUstep source at 
ftp://ftp.gnustep.org/pub. It is also important to point out here that 
getting source from CVS is not advisable for the average user. Quite 
often there are issues with CVS versions of projects (in general, not 
just with GNUstep) since they are in development. There might be some 
experimental code or some code which might not work at all, again this 
is true with all projects, not just GNUstep. In general it is 
recommended that end users make use of the packages provided on the ftp 
site, which are considered to be official releases. These are generally 
better tested and more stable than what might be in CVS at any given 
point in time."

So which advice should a user or potential user follow?  I shall not 
point out that Item 7 on that same page then goes on to explain that 
older versions from CVS were the issue.  When the current "stable" 
version don't build, and the CVS tree is the only potentially viable 
option, and when those build, but don't actually work, what conclusions 
do you really expect?.

Now, all of this said, I will grant that things are better, under Linux. 
 I did get more things built on the Suse 9 box, though, that was 
without icons in most applications, and having to make some other manual 
modifications to the system to get GnuStep apps to properly register 
themselves.

In short, I simply do not see how GnuStep, in it's current state, is 
usable for anyone but the most hard core, die hard users.

For what's it's worth, I wouldn't consider myself the average user, I 
built Mono from the ground up on the Mac OS before it was supported, 
I've built Gnome and GTK by hand on Mac OS.  I've also worked 
extensively with Cygwin (and Win/U) to get Unix apps running on Windows. 
   I'm not afraid of mucking with the system to get things working, but 
there are limits, and getting GnuStep apps working on Windows is 
currently beyond those limits.

What I want to know is if my experience with GnuStep is being marred by 
something I'm not seeing or is this more or less the norm, right now, I 
suspect that it's the norm, because as with most thing Open Source, 
Windows users are deemed to be clueless gits that aren't worth the time 
nor effort.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but right now, I don't feel like I'm 
wrong, please sell me on why I should reevaluate my position, and 
convince my company that GnuStep isn't a dead end.

Andy