FOSDEM Aftermath - the Hotel / Notes from preparing and giving my talk

[Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf]

the Hotel:

- I was quite satisfied with the Argus Hotel. My room was clean (also  
the bath room), breakfast was o.k., some people at my floor did party  
a little bit on saturday night (but not that much that I had to go  
out and give them a bollocking … ;-))

- it helped a lot that most people staid in the same place since made  
getting together (brainstorm folks had a company meeting in the  
breakfast room for instance) and arranging evening activities a lot  
easier.

- if we decide to have a meeting/hackathon on friday it would be very  
helpful to stay in one place to avoid the difficulties of getting  
around, finding each other and meeting

- If we look for another hotel we should make sure that free WLAN is  
available




Notes from preparing and giving my talk

What I experienced during preparing the talk:

- I used a vanilla plain Ubuntu 8.10 as basis for my presentation (I  
also considered Fedora and SuSE but here the out of the box GNUstep  
support is even worse), just to show that all I do in my presentation  
can be done without difficult setup procedures required (and even  
without the need to leave your desktop environment of choice (here I  
used the default that comes with Ubuntu: Gnome))

- Installing GNUstep in Ubuntu using the Synaptic Package Manager was  
rather easy - this (or a similar easy) way should be the way of  
choice to install GNUstep.

- Sadly, the GNUstep packages in Debian/Ubunbtu are somewhat out of  
date (this alone wouldn't have troubled me) and buggy: A simple drag  
and drop action from DBModeler to Gorm wasn't possible with the  
available packages - that tells me we need more testing when doing a  
release.

So I decided to bite the bullet and leave the way of sheer easiness:  
install GNUstep from SVN

- manual GNUstep installation from source is still not a no-brainer.  
Incomprehensible for a newbee with no idea about the concepts and  
structures of GNUstep (for instance the different domains). Despite I  
already did this some time ago I still had to think somewhat hard  
about certain details and read the several INSTALL files over and  
over again. You need to know quite a lot about GNUstep internals to  
understand what you're doing and what to do if something doesn't  
work. Luckily I also archive the discuss-gnustep and gnustep-dev  
lists and could look up things I vaguely remembered (mostly file  
system layout stuff). Also, Dennis Leeuw's build guide was of great  
help for me.

I then finally decided to do a install into the System domain to  
replace what came with Ubuntu (but retain the somewhat good  
integration into the 'Applications' menu of Gnome)

- I found no way how I would determine what Frameworks/Libraries are  
required for a given gnustep-make based project/application (since  
there's no configure phase) and whether those are already installed.

- the need to have GNUstep.sh sourced to make gnustep-make work  
breaks sudo (despite having the sourcing of GNUstep.sh in my system- 
wide /etc/bash.bashrc). I used 'sudo su -' as a workaround but found  
that rather hackish. Maybe I missed something here

- later I had to fight a nasty half-offscreen menu (the title of the  
main menu of DBModeler was offscreen). I found no intuitive way to  
get it back on screen (I tried - for instance - alt-drag, a way to  
grab an usual window anywhere and move it then). I don't know if it  
would be a better idea to automatically "fix" menu positions when an  
application starts (I've heard some people place the menus offscreen  
deliberately to get them out of the way and use the right click to  
get them on demand) or to have a modifier key drag to move the menu  
by grabbing it anywhere. Maybe we should have even both - combined  
with some defaults, let's say

defaults write GSAutoFixMenuPositions false

to switch that behaviour off (standard should be 'on' or 'true' to  
help the newbees)

- while I am on it: I find the right click behaviour of GNUstep (show  
the main menu under the mouse, like OPENSTEP) quite dated. Mac OS X /  
Cocoa has a context based menu on right click nowadays (like every  
other platform). Maybe we can make that configurable too (to cater  
both OPENSTEP heads who like the old behaviour and everybody else who  
expects a context menu): how about a default named  
GSSecondaryClickBehaviour?

- I noticed that at least when using the windows manager of Gnome  
(maybe other too, I didn't test this) the menus of apps in the  
background are not hidden of greyed out. So I often endet up with a  
pletora of menus hanging around, not knowing which one belongs to  
which application. Very confusing! I was told that Window Maker hides  
the menus of apps in the background but I think we should play well  
with other window manager (that aren't aware of GNUstep) too by being  
proactive. At least the menus of apps in the background should be dimmed

- there are other issues with window managers integration (that don't  
support GNUstep) for instance: the dock icons (are those square icons  
called like this?) running apps create interfere with the task bar of  
Gnome (and KDE): they overlap the task bar and the are placed all on  
top of each other (in the lower left corner)

- the integration of dev apps (ProjectCenter, Gorm, GDL2) could be a  
little bit tigher. For instance:
* Currently ProjectCenter creates project templates which contain  
a .gorm file in an outdated version. When you start using that .gorm  
file in Gorm without re-saving it first you might experience a crash  
when dragging some GDL2 stuff into it.
* ProjectCenter doesn't provide a template for GDL2 apps. I  
handcrafted one for my talk, which is not included in ProjectCenter,  
but I have to make a copy of it manually and run a very simple bash  
script over it that renames particular files and changes some files'  
contents accordingly. Worked for the moment but doesn't make the best  
impression in a talk in which I wanted to show the ease of developing  
with GNUstep.

- I got several minor crashes and malfunctions during my talk for  
which I will open bug reports if those are reproducible (the  
developer apps are generally usable but a little bit wonky here and  
there)


the Talk itself:

- Giving a talk is fun, I did this the first time this year and  
despite it was far from perfect it still was very much worth it.

- My general idea was to show a simple app I prepared before and then  
do an all live demo of developing a similar simple database  
application using DBModeler, Gorm, ProjectCenter and PostgreSQL  
because I thought this will be more interesting than just showing  
some slides (I was so naive!) and a real "acid test" and proof on  
GNUstep (it was, kind of).

- I overestimated the thrill this would create and underestimated the  
effort of "developing" such an easy app while talking about what I am  
currently doing, explaining the concepts and concentrating on the  
"development" itself. So my talk dragged on a bit from time to time  
when I was concentrating on "developing" - while still trying to talk  
about it. Especially bad here was I couldn't maintain eye contact  
during this "development action" (which is a no-no for a presenter).

- It seems to be a very good idea to "test" your talk on some of your  
friends or relatives beforehand to get a feeling for your talk, to  
weed out weak spots. I didn't (I was really short on time, still  
hacking together my demo application the same day I gave my talk  
while recording the other talks), my bad.

- So slides aren't all bad (as I thought in my "youthful  
foolishness"): You can explain things in a concentrated form that  
way, better than just with words, hands and obscure live action on a  
screen. Meanwhile I think that I'll mostly show slides next time and  
limit the demo parts to short spans which are non repetitive (like  
creating one entity after each other is) and illustrate only the  
central concepts.


I'd like to read your comments!


regards,

        Lars