Le 11 janv. 06 à 18:03, David Chisnall a écrit :
I recently had the 'opportunity' to use a GNUstep environment full
time for a month while Apple were repairing my PowerBook (a very,
very long story). This got me thinking about what I need in order
to use a working environment full time. Since we said in the GNA
interview that our first target userbase would be ourselves, I am
interested in what we feel would be the minimum requirements for us
to start using a fully- or primarily-Étoilé environment. In other
DEs, this has been the point at which progress has started to be
made at a good speed, since bugs / feature-lacks irritate the
developers enough to get fixed. Here are my thoughts. Note that
these are personal requirements - what else do other people feel
they need?
Minimum Requirements (in no particular order):
1) A working terminal. Terminal.app is fairly nice except that:
- It doesn't render some characters correctly (&, for example)
- It doesn't allow you to change the colours (you can do this
under Linux, but nothing else, and even that's a bit of a hack).
- The history buffer is too short, and there seems to be no way of
changing it.
Terminal.app is decent, but iTerm <http://iterm.sourceforge.net/>
written with Cocoa looks a lot better… mostly because of tabs,
bookmarks and versatile encoding support. I remember Alex Perez
started to port it to GNUstep one year and half ago. Most issues to
be solved were related to 'BSDisms'.
2) A web browser. I used FireFox and the UI is okay, but the menu
bar is in the wrong place and the shortcut keys use control instead
of meta. A port of WebKit to GNUstep or a port of Camino would be
required. I believe this is a work in progress for someone?
Nicolas told me Gregory Casamento is working on a WebKit port (thanks
to latest GCC with Objective-C++ support).
For Camino, port issues have been discussed in a fairly detailed
manner, you may want to take a look to etoile-dev list archive.
3) A mail client. GNUmail seemed okay. I didn't really like the
search interface (I don't like the one in newer versions of
Mail.app either), and it had a habit of eating all of my CPU and
freezing after a few hours of use, but I'm sure I could fix that if
I spent a little while in a debugger.
I don't really like GNUmail, especially its UI. It could surely be
refactored/rethought, but anyway Pantomime framework is providing a
very solid foundation for a new Mail application.
4) LaTeX. This one's easy - it runs pretty much everywhere, and I
don't need a GUI for it.
Nicolas ?
Here are some Cocoa based Tex related applications :
- TexShop which is often praised <http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~koch/
texshop/texshop.html>
- LaTeXit <http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/latexit_en.php>
6) Calendar. iCal in Panther is close to my ideal calendar.
Agenda.app is probably a good starting point. If all else fails,
there is a decent PHP calendar I could run locally, if I had a good
web browser...
Banlu has done really good work with Agenda. I know he was planning
to factor out the calendar view in a separate framework… but it seems
he is not working anymore on it.
7) Jabber Client. I've been dragging my heels a bit on this one.
There are a few bugs I need to fix, but I did some work tidying the
code to make it compile on GNUstep again last month. I am waiting
for the new GORM before I port the UI.
ok. It would be nice to have it.
Later it may be cool to port Adium (it rocks !), but it is a really
big beast sadly with a hell lot of nibs.
9) OmniGraffle replacement. I haven't found a diagramming package
I like as much as this.
Banlu has written a DiagramKit (unfinished iirc), it is currently
part of gsimageapps <https://gna.org/projects/gsimageapps>
10) iTunes replacement. I might work on this a bit. I have some
ideas I'd like to play with.
That would be cool.
11) Presentation tool, ideally with Keynote import. I haven't
really found a presentation tool other than Keynote on any platform
I like. Implementing such a thing on Étoilé should be relatively
easy - all it would really need would be some kind of transition
framework (Nicolas said someone is working on this?) to put joins
between individual slides which could be created with the existing
components.
It's not hard but it isn't easy too and it would take time as usual ;-)
Keynote XML format is rather complex I would say, therefore it might
take a fairly amount time to have a decent compatibility.
12) Some kind of image editing tool. I believe this is, again, a
work in progress.
Maliwan framework by Banlu looks really promising. PRICE by Riccardo
Mottola may provide various filters and transforms.
I'm interested to work on such tool development at a later point.
Maliwan :
<http://home.gna.org/garma/maliwan/>
<http://maliwan.blogspot.com/>
PRICE :
<http://price.sourceforge.net/>
Desired, but not required:
1) Video editing tools. I wouldn't mind keeping a Mac around for
this for a bit, but ideally being able to do it with Étoilé would
be nice. I might spend some time on this - I've been looking for
an excuse to play with OpenGL shaders, and implementing a filter
graph framework and some filters would be a good excuse (yes, I
will write fall-back code for people who don't have shiny GPUs).
I don't think we should work on this initially, but if you are
interested by video support why not… We would need a 'movie view'
framework first and a video player, VideoLAN seems to be the best
choice (the most versatile I would say <http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
features.html>), the player exists in a Cocoa version moreover… even
if its UI is horrible :-)
2) Developer tools. Currently XCode is a good way ahead of
anything GNUstep offers. GORM is close to IB, although I still run
into bugs every time I use it.
Gorm is very good now I think, but it's true that minor minor bugs
still exist when you start to push it. I would say it's our fault
because we aren't reporting them most of time ;-) Gregory has always
fixed very quickly the few bugs I reported.
I would expect it to surpass IB in the next few months if Gregory
keeps up his current pace.
It is possible :-)
DDD is a nicer debugger than the XCode one, and Vim 7 looks like it
will be a better code editor than XCode, so all of the components
should be there soon... Nicolas and Quentin, I believe, both have
some interesting ideas about an IDE, so this looks promising.
We may have interesting ideas but we have no time to work on such IDE
for now. I think we should look forward to see what's happen to both
ProjectManager and ProjectCenter. ProjectManager is starting to look
impressive, I might switch to it when its interface to GDB will be
functional.
For ProjectManager : <http://pmanager.sourceforge.net/>
That's about it for me. My new years resolution is to participate
more actively in Étoilé development (i.e. actually start putting
some code in SVN), so hopefully I shall start to produce some
things of use in the next few months...
Cool. :-)
Cheers,
Quentin.
--
Quentin Mathé
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
