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

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Ivan,

thanks for your mail, I agree with it.

Ivan Vučica wrote:
> 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).
Also, advice flowing in so many and many messages in the same old thread 
makes things confused. When I mentioned the different "goals" of 
gnustep, Doc asks for them. Well, they were enumerated and discussed in 
the same very thread by me and other persons just weeks ago!
> 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 <http://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.
That is evolutive change, which I think is best in a small team of 
volunteers, because it maintains everything working. Few people noticed 
that I changed the website of GS slowly, by rearranging headers, 
cleaning up things, removing old links and then finally applying a new 
style. Then I did the same thing in GAP and the integrated look is great 
I think.

More than once lately some comments came up and at a check, they were 
already implemented.

However I did not touch much of the presentation content itself, I just 
shuffled things around.

Propose fixes, even "patches" after all its CVS managed.. and things 
will improve, as the project itself. Propose better contents. 
Presentation is one thing, but the contents is important.
> And propose this site to be replacement as the homepage (old site 
> being linked to for archival and other purposes).
That's the opposite way of doing thing. Disruptive. Usually, it is more 
difficult to accept. A Mockup might help to present certain key-concepts
> 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 the site which were outdated; Riccardo implemented the fixes.)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.
Some are working on them with little practical success. Ahem :)
> 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.
Well, you are bright and positive. Things moved a lot in the past two 
years, but some problems, bugs and shortcomings are open since 
months/years and this makes other improvements more difficult to appreciate.
> 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.
It could start as a separate core-lib project, like something aside gui 
or as a dev-lib, like CoreBase, that could be discussed. I doubt it 
makes sense to configure gui with "--enable-mobile"!

Riccardo