Re: Extremely poor quality of GNUStep applications

[David Chisnall]

On 20 Apr 2011, at 03:23, Zhang Weiwu, Beijing wrote:

> The application quality is at the level of FOSS desktop products 10 years 
> ago, thus I expect the community behavior is like 10 years ago. Thus I think 
> I should expect replies saying "don't sit there and talk, if you know so much 
> why don't you help? others are helping!" So here is my respond to that reply: 
> I believe showing test result is contributing, "complaining with detail" is 
> contributing and by checking progress once a few years I am doing not bad as 
> a user, besides I cannot contribute like a developer, it's difficult for me 
> to write a Hello World.

Helpful bug reports are, indeed, useful.  This includes usability issue 
reports.  You are, however, complaining in the wrong place.  This is akin to 
complaining to the GTK team about a list of random GNOME apps, or to the Qt 
team about a load of random KDE apps - and if you do so then you will probably 
get a much less polite response than you will get here.  

This is the mailing list for GNUstep, which is a set of frameworks for 
developing applications.  If you find any bugs that are due to these 
frameworks, then please post them (ideally with a reduced test case, but with 
some steps to reproduce if not).  

If you find bugs that are in applications, then please contact the 
maintainer(s) of the relevant applications.  Of the applications listed, I only 
know of one (GWorkspace) that is maintained by someone who I know reads this 
list regularly, and that's because he's ALSO a contributor to GNUstep.  Most of 
the rest, I'd not even heard of.

In short, you are not contributing, because telling this list about problems 
with applications is (from the perspective of the authors of those 
applications) little different from telling some guys in the street, or posting 
on your blog.  

David

-- Sent from my PDP-11