Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Markus Hitter]

Am 29.10.2008 um 14:45 schrieb Gregory John Casamento:

> There's no reason any company porting to Windows should ever choose  
> Cocotron over us.   We're more complete.

I humbly disagree, Greg. Very obviously, there _are_ reasons why  
people choose Cocotron over GNUstep. Just as obviously, these reasons  
are not to find in the area of stability or completeness.

Xcode integration is a big bonus for Mac heads, as one can be an true  
expert in one development environment only. If you have to learn  
another one, thats a duplication of a lot of kmowledge and most  
people would consider this as a waste.

Looking at GNUstep installation ... this is 2008 and 999 of 1000  
Computer users don't know how to set up a compilation environment.  
So, installation from source won't cut it for anybody but developer  
them selfs. Even most developers prefer ready-to-use packages these  
days.

There is a Live CD, there are apt and rpm packages, but ... the Live  
CD won't give me my favourite distro (Ubuntu). So I tried the GNUMail  
package in Ubuntu:

- GNUMail doesn't appear in Gnome's application menu.

- Once one found out how to start the app (hefty googling to find / 
usr/bin/GNUMail), GNUMail appears totally disintegrated from the  
remaining desktop.

- I've yet to find out what's the use of this Dock-like icon at the  
lower left. It appears and distracts.

- Menus won't be recognised as such by most Linuxers. Yet another  
learning curve.

- Looking at the terminal (the only way to start the app), thousands  
of warnings and errors appear. Much worse than what I've ever seen in  
any other app and so many, GNUMail is actually noticeable slowed  
down. It appears to complain about missing fonts.

- There's no reasonable way to get an more up to date GNUstep  
environment, as gnustep.org doesn't feature an apt repository. Those  
project-specific package repos are very often seen these days, at big  
projects like Wine, as well as at one-developer-projects like Gerris,  
to take two examples.

While GNUMail is just an example here, I see no hint how other apps  
or even developing with GNUstep would be more fun. Compiling  
everything from scratch, every week? Thanks, I want to concentrate on  
my own tasks.

There's only one thing you can point your finger at me: I should have  
filed bugs.


I think these are enough samples for why many people choose native  
apps and development environments over GNUstep.


> I don't think we would have this problem.

I very much hope you don't see Cocotron as an enemy. They did a lot  
of work and did some of that work better than GNUstep.


MarKus


P.S.: Sorry for the venting, some GNUsteppers work hard.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/