Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 29 Oct 2008, at 09:01, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> I think this is not completely true. At least I think that
> • Added support for displaying truncated strings.
> is still on the list of the thinks to do :-)

I don't even know what this is ... so I can't tell whether we have it  
or not. However, the other things are clearly features long present in  
GNUstep.

> But all of this is not the point here. This isn't about my system is
> more complete then yours, or is it?
> We all know that GNUstep has more features implemented than  
> Cocotron, it
> also is the much older project. What I still find fascinating with
> Cocotron is how it appeals to Cocoa developers that don't want to  
> leave
> there original development platform and still deliver applications for
> MS Windows. What Cocotron achieved here is unmatched by GNUstep. We
> should accept that and try to match this instead of pointing to the
> shortcomings Cocotron that has plenty. Why wont somebody sit down and
> uses the Cocotron XCode environment to cross compile GNUstep to  
> Windows?
> I don't see any problem in using their development environment  
> although
> it isn't LGPL or GPL. As long as we don't mix the source code we  
> should
> be on the save side. With that done people wanting to port  
> applications
> from Cocoa to Windows have a fair choice. And of course I hope they
> choose GNUstep as it is the project I develop for and which license I
> prefer.
> (For this to happen we will still have to work on our UI appearance.
> Even with a better foundation and more features people are first
> impressed by the look of an application)

Yes ... well, I'm a long time advocate of theming in GNUstep, but we  
need someone to actually work on it :-(
In any case, perhaps you are referring to other appearance glitches  
etc, I don't know if GNUstep is any worse or better than Cocotron in  
that respect on windows  (better when I looked, but that was quite a  
while ago).

My feel from reading the blog about this port is, that the issue of  
completeness is unimportant (GNUstep clearly being much more complete,  
but a developer only needs the features they want to use, and in a  
free software project can add minor missing features) and reliability  
is also unimportant (GNUstep being much more reliable, but a developer  
only needs bits they want to use to be reliable, and in a free  
software project can fix minor bugs).  It seems that in these areas  
Cocotron is now 'good enough'.

So I agree with your main point ... the only reason I can see for  
Cocotron being chosen in this case is that a Mac developer was able to  
simply use XCode to port to windows, and the obvious way to add that  
capability to GNUstep is to 'steal' that from Cocotron.  Presumably we  
could take the development environment, hack it a little to support  
generic unix as well as windows, and provide a MacOS installer package  
to install it on our web site, so that people could build using XCode  
for GNUstep on windows and unix-style operating systems.

Is there any Mac based developer out there who'd like to do that?