Re: The need for an official GNUstep desktop

[Adrian Robert]

On Aug 28, 2006, at 7:43 AM, Peter Cooper wrote:

> I've been running Terminal.app on NetBSD for ages, and apart from  
> some cosmetic issues that I can't easily fix because of the at- 
> times-incomprehensible-genius of the authori, it's a very pleasant  
> terminal environment that I use every day for all sorts of involved  
> character-mode things.

;)  I once spent a fair amount of time poking through the code just  
trying to figure out how to make it change the background color to  
something not black.

But anyway I didn't mean to imply these apps were production-quality,  
simply that they were good enough to be put together in a desktop  
environment that is understood to be beta -- particularly on non- 
linux ;).  Granted the 80-20 rule for actually completing them, but  
with an assembled desktop hopefully a lot more pairs of eyes would be  
looking at the apps, and hopefully some of those would turn towards  
the code when they got annoyed at bugs or missing functionality..

It may make sense for gnustep.org to start hosting the development  
source code for those projects that are viable but abandoned (does  
backbone fall in here?).  This is however different from the idea I  
was talking about for a repository of source code _release packages_,  
which feeds to the official desktop install as well as distribution  
maintainers.  And there's no reason apps releasing here should have  
to host their _development_ inside of gnustep if they're already set  
up elsewhere.

Again: Camaleon, Window Manager / GWorkspace integration, startx  
script, release source package repository, installer / updater app -- 
> wham, a GNUstep desktop.  Not trivial, but we're not that far away  
either.