Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Ivan Vučica]

Doc,

I love to learn from people who were coding before I was born, but you're projecting more negativity than good plans, lessons, and new code.

Your efforts won't be wasted; even if a particular change in documentation doesn't get upstreamed directly does not mean you can't publish your own. Nicola Pero's tutorials are a really good introduction that I'd point people to; they don't live in central project repo nor on the website. (And checking out the web page brings me to a specific proposal: Riccardo, could you add a more prominent link to Nicola's tutorials?) 

Philippe's Debian packages are also not hosted by the core project; that didn't stop him.

You weren't stopped from writing agentd. Was it a wasted effort?

I was telling you what to do only in a sense that I saw a lot of hostility and anger (while at the same time you claim everyone else is hostile). I get it, you want GNUstep to be more like OS X. I would too. I went to the meeting in Cambridge (thanks once again to David for kindly organizing it), met with developers, got the opinions in person, discussed what is realistic to achieve. 

Some people are interested mostly in using GNUstep it as a core library for server software. Some are interested in using GNUstep as a NeXT desktop replacement. Some would like to use it as OS X alternative, and others yet want to use it as a core to grow beyond both NeXT and OS X. (Please take a look at Eric's and Quentin's excellent work on Core Object and what Etoile tries to do.) Finally, some people would prefer GNUstep to be a very small and lean platform that makes the most out of even some very ancient hardware.

Would you care to join us at the meeting this year, wherever the meeting ends up being?

Because as an experienced person you must realize that goals you are setting are too large. Attracting OS X and iOS developers is a good goal, but too large. Let's chop it up into pieces. Let's see what could be achieved by one motivated developer within next 3 months. 

Then the person proposing the change should sit down and make it, because noone else will.

On Thu Dec 19 2013 at 7:30:24 PM, Doc O'Leary <droleary@7usenet2013.subsume.com> wrote:

They certainly don't seem to be leading to discussions that improve the
overall direction of the project.  Case in point is my root "rant" to
this discussion that got dropped: what *is* the current message of
GNUstep?  Do people agree that the website is a confused mess when it
comes to communicating that message?

Yes, but let's be more specific than "the current website is a mess". How do we go about fixing it? Who will do the cleanup?

 

A great example of the underlying issue is how you treat the Mac/iOS.
What *should* be a platform of coders and existing apps you'd like to
get over to GNUstep, you instead seem actively hostile towards.  You
essentially tell OS X users to get lost!  It makes no sense to me that
*that* is the result of the MacPorts issues.

I'm afraid that "please install Ubuntu inside VirtualBox or help us fix OS X" is far from "go away".

Someone needs to sit down and fix the OS X code.

I personally tried a few times, but things break in sufficiently odd places that I gave up, hoping someone else posts concise instructions that depend on as little external code as possible. (And MacPorts portfile is not what should be a priority; we need a documented set of instructions that someone can then use to write the MacPorts file.)

 

And what I'm trying to say is that, in my experience, that is just so
much wasted effort without understanding the big picture.  Why would I
bother working up a Mac-friendly best practices HOWTO if the overall
desire of the GNUstep community is to remain hostile to them?  Same goes
for coding; don't slap away the hands that know how to scratch your itch.

Why do you presume that all of GNUstep community is hostile to something like that? Why do you presume that you need to write this for GNUstep community as it stands today, as opposed to writing for other developers?

I would like to see the Mac-friendly best practices HOWTO. I hope that I understand correctly what you mean by it, because it sounds interesting. I would like to see this howto attract someone better than me to write some of the things I wanted to implement.

 

So you say here, but where is that being communicated to the larger
community on the website or elsewhere?  These are the harsh realities
that need to be resolved.  I clearly have strong opinions on what should
be done, but I still have *zero* idea whether or not that is the
direction GNUstep *actively* wants to go.  I mean, there is *nothing* on
the website that indicates any knowledge of the existence of iOS, let
alone any efforts to "capitalize on the popularity".  Either that needs
to be changed or it needs to be further discussed.

Let's acknowledge existence of iOS. Good. Now how did that help that person who just wants to call [UIButton buttonWith...]?

We can make a rallying call: "Help us fix our implementation of Core Animation!" "Help us link our implementation of Core Animation with gnustep-gui!" "Help us implement equivalent of UIKit!"

Wouldn't that be more pathetic than sitting down and trying to contribute code that would perhaps let someone work on an implementation of UIKit button?

 

The worst part about this discussion is that, somewhere deep down, we actually agree. I think we need to define a direction better. I think working on compatibility of animation-related and graphics-related APIs in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch is good. I think the site needs to look better.

Yes, compared to the experience of you and experience of almost all GNUstep developers, I am but a child. I shouldn't have been the one contributing Core Animation. I shouldn't have been the one contributing Opal-based backend.

Please point me to the person who would have listened to me saying: "This is a good direction, please someone implement Core Animation so I can play with it and learn from it!"

You can give direction and leadership as much as you want, but in the end, the best leadership is by pulling people and project in the right direction yourself.

Or paying others to listen to your leadership!