Re: IA: regular-gnustep.iso LiveCD (stable builds available)

[Michael Shigorin]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 05:12:55PM +0200, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> >http://en.altlinux.org/Starterkits/gnustep
> That's great! It makes me a little proud to see screenshots of
> programs I developed or fixed myself inside a finished
> distribution! Warms your heart slightly....

:-)

> Did you package GWorkspace? I miss it from the screenshots...

Yes: http://packages.altlinux.org/en/Sisyphus/srpms/gnustep-gworkspace

> And BatteryMonitor?

Is it? http://packages.altlinux.org/en/Sisyphus/srpms/gnustep-BatMon

> perhaps you could add a list of packaged apps.

It's all Eugene's work along with another guy's help at menufiles
(I can tar those up and post separately, BTW); please find the
package lists attached, added links to the wiki page too, thanks.

> The menus look impressive, you must have packaged a lot of stuff!

Some of the apps had to be ruled out for being mildly or totally
broken with regards to functionality even if they got built and
packaged but that left us with *lots* of software which behaved
surprisingly well within UTF-8 environment and Russian locale
given that some of the code hasn't been touched for 10 or 12y
-- pretty impressive!

> >Reactions were varying from "gorgeous!" to "you won't setup an
> >office girl with this" to "you won't sell it unless it's slick
> >and pretty out-of-box" [...]
> Different opinions are normal. Someone wants something super-sleek, 
> someone wants something classic and traditional. Otherwise we wouldn't 
> have so many desktop environments, discussion for themes, etc etc.

That's one of the reasons I tackled the whole Regular Builds
project -- trying to bring upstream take at *NIX GUIs "as is":
http://en.altlinux.org/Starterkits#livecd
http://en.altlinux.org/Regular

I was thoroughly amused to discover that Softpedia have went
to review this truckload of images and it seems that these have
defined ALT Linux for them to some extent, even being just a part
of my personal project supported by ALT Linux Ltd lately:
http://linux.softpedia.com/downloadTag/ALT+Linux

GNUstep related item is not so much regarding GNUstep unfortunately,
seems that there's some room for first-time impression still.

I've seen http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/ but making a *proper*
distribution will take more love, talent, time and patience than
I'm able to find continuously (so rather chose to provide more
or less raw/solid base for those willing to improve upon it).

> Have you packaged SystemPreferences and a couple of themes?

Yes: http://packages.altlinux.org/en/Sisyphus/srpms/gnustep-systempreferences
and http://packages.altlinux.org/en/search?query=gnustep-theme-

Haven't fiddled much with these so this might be one of the
useful points to apply some kind advice :-)

> But the most improtant stuff is probably for you:
> 1) improve and complete themes
> 2) improve and complete existing apps
> 3) new apps

Eugene Rostovtsev (real/altlinux.org) has done tremendous job
on that and he seems to be going on with both maintenance
and packaging more bits; I've forwarded your message.

> You deliver a GNUstep environment after all and we know it is
> sadly incomplete or buggy...

Well I know how helpful it is to be actually able to hand a livecd
over, and what cleanroom testing means for complex software
projects (along with easier pieces built upon those); so my take
is "bootstrap software, glue people together" and not trying to
fix the world singlehandedly.

There's a terse list of woes identified with particular apps,
maybe it should be translated and posted so that people with
experience suggest to drop or replace those, or find the fix
easy enough to land.

I can also prepare some sort of development image putting more of
the developer-oriented GNUstep software there (some of that has
been skipped from this rather user-oriented one) and maybe ALT's
build tools so those interested can both build packages and
rebuild ISO images as they wish.

And maybe I should subscribe the list finally (hesitated due to
several dozen lists onboard already but hey it's mutt). :-)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin / http://altlinux.org
  ------ http://opennet.ru / http://anna-news.info

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