Re: Was GNUstep ready for GNUstep ?

[Fred Kiefer]

Hi Yves,

as one of the main developers of GNUstep I was at first a bit annoyed by
your mail. But I clearly have to accept your point here. Quite a few of
the GNUstep packages have not been ready for the new make 2.0 when this
was released.

GNUstep make 2.0 has been a very important step forward. It allows
everybody to have a file structure for GNUstep just the way he wants.
This will take away much criticism from GNUstep and will allow
discussions about more important issues. We had to integrate this
important change into the new release and not wait for another release.
The changes in make required some changes in the modules using make and
Nicola made these changes for a lot of the modules in the GNUstep SVN
repository. Nobody could expect him to do it for all of them. Somehow it
was implicitly expected that who ever is maintaining a module would take
the time between the changes and the release to adopt the module. This
has not happened in all cases.

Now instead of blaming ourself for this we should ask, what can we do
about it? Maintain a list of who is in charge of which module and only
make a GNUstep release, when we get a go from all of them? Then where
should we draw the line? Just modules in the GNUstep SVN? That would
exclude such important project as Etoile. On the other hand we cannot
expect that every software that uses GNUstep gets update before a
GNUstep release. What we hope to achieve is that after a release of
GNUstep all modules using it get updated within a reasonable time.

I would even say that it is enough to update them, when somebody
complains that they are no longer working :-)
According to this criteria we are not doing that bad. As far as I can
tell modules get updated as soon as somebody complains.
Modules where nobody complains should then be marked as deprecated, as
nobody seems to be using them with current GNUstep releases.

Fred

Yves de Champlain wrote:
> After upgrading to make-2.0, I find many many many packages now just
> break at compile (I'm not tlaking about my personnal issue with back-0.12).
> 
> Is it too early to upgrade ?  Like it is for Vista ? (oh boy, that was
> mean ...)
> 
> I'm provoking a bit, but it would have been darn simple if every
> developer had taken a __few_minutes__ to fix his own stuff.
> 
> - Many packages still die trying if GNUstep.sh was not sourced
> - Some try to link with Framework/Version/A
> - Some have GNUSTEP_INSTALLATION_DIR all over the place
> 
> I mean, why doesn't anybody care ?  I find make-2.0 very a good step
> (not joking), but even ProjectCenter, a core GNUstep app is not
> "2.0-ready".
> 
> Ok, I admit, I had a rough day yesterday ... and I always say coding is
> better than yelling, but every now and then, the great discussion of
> "The Future of GNUstep"(TM) comes along on this list, what else can I
> say ... I feel like it will be many months before I can upgrade
> gnustep-core without patching 20 or so other packages.  Bleak future if
> you ask.