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.