Re: Comments on the website from people on twitter...

[Dan Hitt]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 7:17 PM, Gregory Casamento
<greg.casamento@gmail.com> wrote:
...........

> The goals of GNUstep are quite clear.  Our goal is to create an API which is
> a clone of the latest version of Cocoa and to provide the best development
> environment on as many operating systems as we can.
>
> Regarding the "Trying to support everything" question... this is actually
> not what is time consuming.  The problem mainly is that Cocoa is a moving
> target and it moves quickly.  We are 10-20 developers working part time on a
> project which has no funding and no company which formally backs it.  The
> one thing we do get is a lot of feedback and absolutely no help.   So, my
> suggestion is, if you're interested in making GNUstep easier to use and
> better on your particular platform, then join us and start doing so.

Greg,

Thanks so much for writing these two paragraphs.  They are edifying.

Now, in fact, i do benefit from GNUstep in a direct, practical way.
I use Camera.app to transfer pictures from my digital camera to
my ubuntu system, and it is the very best program for doing this,
imvho.  And it exists as a package in ubuntu, so it is easy to
install and use.

So i want to be very clear that i appreciate GNUstep, and understand
that you and the rest of the team have put a lot into it, and justifiably
are entitled to set the direction of the project.

So i will not provide you feedback about where the project should go
(although if there were a project which had the goal of creating
a gnustep distro that you could install on an empty partition
and boot into with grub, i'd be mighty interested, as i still
think NeXTstep was the high point of personal computers).

But i would like to make one observation about your goal of
tracking (making a 'clone' of) 'the latest version of Cocoa'.
As you have noted, that is hard to do because Cocoa is
a moving target.

I would say, with all due respect and appreciate for your work,
that it is not only hard to do, it is impossible to do.

Cocoa changes in part just so it cannot be cloned, and if
you ever do have close to a credible clone, you can bet it will
move some more.  It is like the 'large bright thing that
looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box,
and was always in the shelf next above the one' Alice was
looking at (Wool and Water, in Through the Looking Glass).

But no matter what, i do appreciate your work.  (I appreciate
Alice, too!)

And if somebody does decide to make a NeXTstep-like distro,
i'll appreciate that also, and download it, and install it.

dan