Re: GNUstep Live on OSnews

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi Liam,


you actually sum up several of GNUstep's goal, but at the same time, the 
issues  to show it of..


On 31/07/2017 15:56, Liam Proven wrote:
> The main concern is if installing a 5MB app sucks in 500MB of
> dependencies and thrashes the disk for 10sec when you load it.

The issue is that GS if "fully configured" with all options (libxmk, 
libxslt, ICU, cairo... where you pull in other dependencies like 
freetype, several X components, all image libraries) and also GWorkspace 
with its options (e.g. PDFKit) you and up with that if not more. I know 
I couldn't fit an OS on a 2GB SD card for Raspberry. Most of that is 
usually already there if you have other GTK apps because it is shared.

However you can configure things "down"... and this is why I fight so 
much about our dependencies. By cutting here and there you cans till get 
a complete workspace with GWorkspace, GAP apps and even Dev apps in a 
2GB solid-state-disk of the Letux400 :) And you can do even smaller.

> What GNUstep could provide, it seems to me, boils down to these things:
>
> [1] A NEXTstep-like desktop for Linux (and other free Unices)
>
> As a clean, attractive, lightweight desktop, and a re-creation of one
> of the most widely-admire desktops ever, this has clear appeal.

It has, to a very small niche. This is something I want to achieve and I 
know and read of people interested from time to time. This has some 
"Issues":
- people striving for that are either "minimalist modern" people or 
nostalgic people who want something quite polished, stable... and we 
aren't even if we improved a lot.. lots of work to do, some is
- the nostalgic people ask and want "original" NeXT or OpenStep apps of 
which we don't have the sources to "port" them (also, porting them could 
be quite a work, especially for NeXT stuff)

> [2] A rich, clean set of libraries and programming tools for app development
>
> Something that few other desktops can offer and a selling point to
> FOSS developers.

For those who like our programming paradigm, yes. And Objective-C !
Also... This is the thing we should be most proud of, because it means 
we need to be "complete enough" to be useful and not "complete compared 
to a certain version of Cocoa".

> [3] Tools for building cross-desktop and cross-platform apps
>
> A clear message that the tools do not limit you to the GNUstep
> desktop, but will run on other desktops as well as Windows and Mac.
>
> [4] Tools for building apps against both native macOS and Linux.

I don't fully understand the difference here. You build an application 
and can "build it natively on Mac". Then you can use GNUstep's 
portability on Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Solaris, MinGW on Windows!

However...  for such an ambitious library, you might find we have quite 
some "holes" in terms of bugs or missing functionality...

With this, I do not want to stop you in your configuration installations 
and tutorials, they are very welcome!

Riccardo