Re: project goal Re: Release schedule

[Helge Hess]

Philippe C.D.Robert wrote:
> it's funny and sad at the same time that we have such discussions every 
> now and then...

Yes. Notably GNUstep didn't move any further in public recognition so 
far. We still have the state that gstep-base is stable, other things not.

> Well, I am not sure about that. What added value does CF offer compared 
> to pure OpenStep? As far as I understand this API has been mainly 
> introduced for previous Mac OS developers in order to help them bring 
> their sources to Carbon and new Mac OS X technologies such as Quartz, as 
> well as for Apple itself to have a common base layer for the Carbon and 
> Cocoa worlds.

CF adds compatibility to MacOSX. Several things (eg XML and full HTTP) 
are only available in CF but not in Cocoa but used in Cocoa applications 
(because it's useful base functionality).

> OK, some of your points are worth a second thought while others are IMHO 
> not - as you have stated before, if somebody wants to work on gui he 
> will do it. And I certainly don't think this discussion is about 
> "whether we should drop gui or not". Moreover you are always free to 
> start a new project based on -base, and you don't even have to kill -gui 
> beforehand :-)

Sure. My points are only true if the goal is a project which tries for 
completion. If it's pure hacking-for-fun without a required goal and for 
the developers personal use only, there is no need to discuss.

> I am a former NeXT user (I still have 3 black boxes running at home:) 
...
> and guess what, I still *am* interested in NEXTSTEP's look and feel, or 
> more precisely I am mainly interested in that :-)

OK. +2 for NeXTstep, +1.000.000 for MacOSX ;-) Again, no doubt that 
there are people which still like the NeXTstep UI better (Richard said 
so too), but *IMHO* the vast majority of users do not care and prefer 
the other.

> I just disagree with that :-) But on the same time I agree that there is 
> an inherent problem with GNUstep and its development cycles. Why does it 
> make such a slow progress, why are there not more programmers interested 
> in contributing? I am afraid one main reason (for the latter) is the 
> language, would we use C++ or Java I bet we would see much wider 
> interest. But unfortunately this is not in our hands, we can only hope 
> that Apple's marketing will help us here!

We are discussing that for years without effect. Apple is advertising 
Cocoa for years now with little effect for GNUstep. Why ? Because it's 
not interesting because it does nothing a Cocoa developer cares about.

> > a) IMHO the real advantage is Objective-C. It's simply the better Java 
> > and the better C#. IMHO the biggest advantage of ObjC is it's 100% 
> > integration with C (to the level of toll free bridging as seen in 
> > CoreFoundation).
> It is better indeed, but who knows it, who uses it aside from some Apple 
> developers? So while it is better in technical terms it imposes (big) 
> problems to the project because it is so little known and used - but 
> again, maybe Apple can change this (in the long term!)...

You can convince/show people by providing *solutions* (usually 
applications). Zope is the Python solution which made it widely know, 
before it was just yet-another-scripting language.

> > It's certainly a project that looks very doable to write a very good 
> > and complete Objective-C wrapper for Gnome or KDE in, say 3 months 
> > using 5 people.
> While this could definitely be an interesting project I doubt it has 
> anything to do w/ GNUstep :-)

What is GNUstep ? ;-) An incomplete GUI library which is never going to 
be completed ? (yes, aggressive, but see my points about resources which 
do not go away by not talking about it ;-)

regards,
  Helge