Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Ivan Vučica]

On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 6:00 PM, Doc O'Leary <droleary@6usenet2013.subsume.com> wrote:

In article <mailman.6930.1385229119.10748.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,

 Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
 > This is quite good, this is how most people look for things, since it is

> much faster than wading through a website. Wow, it took me about 1
> second to find that information.

Stop being a jerk.  In trying to deflect the issue, you made my case for
me.  Yes, gnustep.org is a "wading" experience.  So why not fix it
rather than trying to insult people who might otherwise be interested in
GNUstep?

Doc,

without getting deeper into discussion, and without disagreeing with either Riccardo or you, and not even thinking gnustep.org is at the exact place where it should be, I would highly advise you to take your own advice into account as well. It is not good to be so negative and so irritated at what you perceive as bad things in GNUstep's presentation.

Advice only gets projects so far. The hard part is actually contributing (which I have humbly learned during all of my clumsy attempts to do so wherever I truly tried to make a difference). 

Pick a gripe you have with GNUstep and make your own changes. Make them optional and then try to push for them. Design your own ideal gnustep.org based on your experiences with the site. Do you think link X should be on the middle-right of the top fold? Put it there. Upload the result somewhere. Make a minimal site, lacking most of the information; but point the community in the right direction.

And propose this site to be replacement as the homepage (old site being linked to for archival and other purposes).

There is little point in trying to move a mountain. Move a single rock, then move the next one, then move the next one.

Eric made some awesome themes. Riccardo is already moving the site in a positive direction. (A few months ago I have myself had comments on the site which were outdated; Riccardo implemented the fixes.) Last year I have worked on Core Animation, and this year on a Opal (Core Graphics) backend. People are working on session managers.

Things ARE moving in the direction of usability. And considering everyone IS solving their own issues with the system, mostly volunteering private time, for academic research, and occasionally on company dime (solving things that have to do with serving content and not end-user desktop), things ARE moving remarkably well.

Feel free to contribute solutions for your desires where GNUstep should move next. Based on my past contributions, you can see that I agree with the assessment that it would be interesting to see compatibility with some iOS UI APIs. Based on my past contributions, I can assure you that it's far harder than it may look... if you want to do it right, in a compatible manner, with as little bugs as possible.

--

Ivan Vučica

ivan@vucica.net