Re: Windows and GnuStep

[Andrew Ruder]

On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 09:03:42AM -0500, Andy Satori wrote:
> I'm going to ask a silly question, where pray tell would I have looked 
> to find a reference to bugs.gnustep.org

This, I think is one of the few excellent points made in this thread.
Is there any way we can get both the Bugs and the WIKI very prominently
on the main page?  I was shocked to see that neither were on the links
on the side (especially considering that the Wiki seems to be used quite
a bit).  I apologize for the jumping on you for that, because, well, it
really isn't as obvious as I thought it was.

> Project Center won't build because it makes poor assumptions about 
> symlinks and filesystem abilities in it's build process. 

If it really is just a build process issue, this can probably be fixed.

> GnuMail can't build because AddressBook can't build, because it's
> apparently never been built on Windows to resolve linking order issues
> and needs some platform specific ifdef's to get around type
> declaration issue with u_int and uint, even built, it doesn't in fact
> work.

If AddressBook is having linking issues, I'm pretty sure that would mean
its already outside the scope of FoundationKit (or AppKit for that
matter).  If the Openstep API does not include code to do something or
do something in a reasonable way, and people start using POSIX calls and
such in their code, you really can't hold that against GNUstep, can you?

> So, I downloaded NetClasses.  Guess what, it doesn't use -gui, never
> got to the GUI part.  It doesn't build either (results pasted at the
> end of this message), no I didn't try to debug it the build yet.

Yes, because netclasses uses BSD socket code among other non-standard
things ( i.e. you can't write netclasses using just the Openstep API,
and as mentioned before, that would fall outside of the scope of GNUstep
once again ).

> It does help explain my point.  No user that is used to the 
> ./configure;make;make install; world of most OSS apps, even on Windows 
> is going to get far.  As a rule, one app that doesn't work, ok.  But 
> when one out of many succeeds, while the rest consistantly fail?  You 
> aren't going to retain many casual users.

GTK works on windows just fine, but do people really expect all GTK apps
to compile fine under windows?  I'd be highly surprised if that were the
case.  Now, in some cases they obviously do, but they've had to put very
specific work into fixing all the non-GTK code to work on windows as
well.

> The question is, how should that be fixed?  should the website be 
> adjusted?  should there be a concentrated effort to fix the Windows 
> port? ( I can set up a Windows box that could be used a test mule for 
> the GS devs ).

Well, I think among other things, the website should definitely be
fixed.  Almost all OSS projects these days have a way to report bugs
very prominently on the page, and that is a good thing.  As far as your
next suggestion goes, its not just a lack of hardware and software, some
of it is just lack of a.) motivation b.) knowledge.  I personally do not
use windows, so porting my stuff to windows has never been a major
motivating factor.  And porting things to windows has two different
classes of problems:
 
  a.) The raw code rewrite.  I mean, you have to go through, factor out
code that is OS specific and find alternatives for everything.
Comparatively speaking this is the easy part.

  b.) The linking issues, the dll issues, the library issues, the
registry issues, the little intricate details that cause things to not
work issues.  These aren't things that can be fixed with access to a
machine, because some of it will just take months and years of
development and learning to figure out all these things.  I salute the
people that have gotten GNUstep as far as it is on windows, because to
most OSS developers, windows is just a black box.  If it happens to
work, terrific.  If it doesn't, well, you wait for it to work. ;)  What
we really need is someone who has done a good deal of windows work,
wants to work on gnustep, and understands all the little itsy bitsy
details.  Oh, and they have lots and lots of free time. :)

- Andy

-- 
Andrew Ruder
http://www.aeruder.net