Re: The need for an official GNUstep desktop

[Adrian Robert]

On Aug 27, 2006, at 3:23 PM, Gregory John Casamento wrote:

> All,
>
> All of this discussion on the list has made my consider that GNUstep 
> needs to resolve this confusion once and for all.   Are we a desktop 
> or a development environment?   I believe that we can, and should, be 
> both.   One of the steps we need to take towards doing this is the 
> creation of another project which will be the official GNUstep 
> desktop.
>
> Up until now we've had 4 or 5 projects playing at being the official 
> desktop in an effort to fill the void.
>
> I believe that all of this is senseless duplication and that what we 
> need is a *coordinated* effort towards making a cohesive and 
> attractive GNUstep desktop environment.   We need to focus on what 
> will make an exciting and easy experience for both users and 
> developers.  Whether it is done in the same repository as GNUstep or 
> in a separate one, that's up for debug.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas on the above?


We need a project that will pull together existing efforts, create an 
easy installation/update environment, and encourage effort towards 
helping out on existing apps.  Because those existing apps really do a 
tremendous job of covering many desktop needs:

GWorkspace + appwrappers
Terminal
TextEdit
GNUMail
TalkSoup
Emacs
Cynthiune
(PDF Viewer)
(Image Viewer)
(various games, miscellaneous)
(Preferences?)
(and more: http://www.gnustep.org/experience/apps.html)

That's pretty much where GNOME was when it was first getting installed 
by default through the major linux distributions -- except there are 
more apps for GNUstep, they are more mature, and the framework is less 
buggy and more complete.

What would this new project look like?  Adam's Startup is an excellent 
start ;).  I just tried it today on a linux system, and it went smooth 
as butter.  It checks for dependencies and gets the initial bootstrap 
system up and running.  The next step, as Adam has mentioned, would be 
a graphical installer / updater that runs after this and allows the 
user to select/install apps.  To support this, the apps need to provide 
source packages hosted at a central server.

To avoid dependency on any one distribution's package mechanism, the 
installer app would ideally include its own facility for querying the 
server for latest versions, and uninstalling/updating.  Packages would 
need to be based on source code / GNUstep-make.  This is not trivial 
work, but significant effort has gone into the underpinnings for this 
in the form of the Installer.app from Etoile.  That project adapts the 
old NeXTstep package system to GNUstep's needs and includes features 
from the current Cocoa one.

The final hurdle after this is to update the user's startx or 
equivalent to run GWorkspace.  Of course, this brings up the need to 
interoperate better with other window managers and non-click-to-focus, 
particularly as WindowMaker is not the most actively maintained project 
out there.  Also, it goes without saying, Camaleon into GNUstep core 
and GUI control over it is a prerequisite for any of this..

This effort should be coordinated with Etoile, the main existing 
desktop project.  Etoile is more ambitious and will take longer to get 
to end-user viability than what I'm talking about above, but there's no 
reason not to share efforts, particularly in the package maintenance / 
installer / update area.