Philipe has definitely done a lot of great work with the Debian packages. I've been using them and they're a massive step up from what Debian provides. From a daily user perspective what I'm missing the most is stuff like a multitabbed terminal so I don't have windows spewing out all over the desktop. Better Window Manager integration so applications don't try to float over the apple-style menu bar, and the web browser because the macintosh style menus disappear every time you click a non-gnustep application. Even something as simple as making the window manager and top menu wrap 3rd party applications so the bar stayed and the app's name was on it with a window menu for minimise/maximise/close when you click on non gnustep applications would be a massive step up for desktop usability. I could then run chromium or firefox alongside gnustep without issue. It's little things that make a big difference. I would use Window Maker, except there's some gui things I can't turn off on it, and it's menus don't integrate completely into nsmacintoshmenustyle or nswindowsmenustyle. I think these things are actually very important to fix, because once they are fixed gnustep will be more comfortable to work within. Once you are booting/using gnustep on a daily basis then you're a lot more likely to start trying to extend its functionality. Some people looking for a Macintosh-style experience will come along and try to hack on it like I've done. It's really these little things that make a big difference. As nice as it would be to get the Webkit stuff ported in, I don't see it being in any sort of usable state for another decade due to lack of manpower, and that's not the fault of the project or anyone here. It's just the reality we're facing. Since that's the case, an alternative is needed whether it's a wrapper ala Mantella.app from etoile (which no longer works) or we just wrap all X11 non-gnustep applications into the gnustep desktop environment (etoile).
On Sunday, December 22, 2013, Fred Kiefer wrote:
On 21.12.2013 20:01, Ivan Vučica wrote:
> On Sat Dec 21 2013 at 6:36:31 PM, Markus Hitter <mah@jump-ing.de> wrote:
>> Why do
>> most people here expect users to compile software from tarballs? Outside
>> of GNUstep people are used to use appstores (which Ubuntu provides).
>>
>
> That's simply a result of the reality of the project:
> - occasionally, there are still important patches in SVN
> - people come to the mailing list and complain not even about tarballs, but
> about the state of Debian packages
> - if we were to do it, someone would have to maintain releases for Debian,
> for Ubuntu, for Gentoo, for OpenSUSE, for FreeBSD, for OS X, for Windows...
> see how the list grows?
>
> David and others take care of FreeBSD. Philippe is taking care of Debian
> and Ubuntu. It'd be great to create a build farm with all the various OSes
> and set up a nightly build system. It may be possible to make use of
> openSUSE Build Service (or a local installation using Open Build Service).
> Who will do it?
Me? In our wiki (http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Platform:Linux) you
can find a link to this OBS project
(https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=X11%3AGNUstep) where I
provide at least the four core packages. Building for OpenSuse 13.1 is
currently broken but will be fixed as soon as the next GNUstep release
is out.
I am willing to support more packages for OpenSuse if I get an initial
spec file for them.
Fred
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