Re: Plans for change....
Hi Gregory, good luck as GNUstep maintainer! On 16.12.2006, at 05:10, Gregory John Casamento wrote: 1) Adopt a more modern look. This includes the look of the windows, the color scheme and how the menus are rendered. It's okay to let that old gui go, it's not going to kill you to do so. ;) Users like things to look "good". This is entirely subjective. Personally, I think GNOME and KDE are quite ugly under the best of circumstances. To this end, we need to make integrated theming available in GNUstep and make it easy. As long as the NEXTSTEP look is still available this is OK to me ;-) 3) Eliminate the need for GNUstep.sh, either by making GNUstep place it's binaries and libraries in more "standard" places, or by providing an installation procedure I would strongly prefer the first option, unless GNUstep becomes a full-blown desktop environment... 6) Decide what we are. Yes, that's right. Some people view GNUstep as a desktop, others view GNUstep as a development environment. GNUstep needs to define itself as one or the other. The website says it's a development environment, but it has many aspects which fit the definition of a desktop environment. In truth, I believe it should be both. In either case, if sb wants to use GNUstep as a development environment/cross-platform framework only then IMO there should be no need to have any deamons running in the background, it should just be a simple set of libraries/frameworks/DLLs. This would make adoption a lot easier. Just my $0.01 ... ;-) -Phil -- Philippe C.D. Robert http://www.nice.ch/~phip ___ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
Re: Plans for change....
Am 16.12.2006 um 05:10 schrieb Gregory John Casamento: All, I've written up a short list of things that I want GNUstep to accomplish in the year to come: As Chief maintainer, it is up to me to determine the direction of the project. . . . 2) Make regular releases. Start courting different distributions to include GNUstep in their package set. Start getting the word out. Start making sure that people KNOW that GNUstep is alive and well. This, I believe, is the main reason why people have the perception that GNUstep is dead. We don't push ourselves hard enough and into enough distributions to be visible enough for people to care. may I, as a part of getting more "press coverage" for GNUstep, submit your mail to slashdot or do you think it is to early for such a step and we should discuss the matter first? regards, Lars ___ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
Re: Plans for change....
Please submit it to slashdot, if you like. It would be nice to let the community know that things are going to change with this project. -- Gregory Casamento ## GNUstep Chief Maintainer - Original Message From: Lars Sonchocky-Helldorf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Gregory John Casamento <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: GNUstep Developers Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2006 8:46:15 AM Subject: Re: Plans for change Am 16.12.2006 um 05:10 schrieb Gregory John Casamento: > All, > > I've written up a short list of things that I want GNUstep to > accomplish in the year to come: > > As Chief maintainer, it is up to me to determine the direction of > the project. > . . . > 2) > Make regular releases. Start courting different distributions to > include GNUstep in their package set. Start getting the word out. > Start > making sure that people KNOW that GNUstep is alive and well. This, I > believe, is the main reason why people have the perception that > GNUstep > is dead. We don't push ourselves hard enough and into enough > distributions to be visible enough for people to care. may I, as a part of getting more "press coverage" for GNUstep, submit your mail to slashdot or do you think it is to early for such a step and we should discuss the matter first? regards, Lars ___ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
Re: Plans for change....
On 16/12/2006, at 5:10, Gregory John Casamento wrote: 1) Adopt a more modern look. I like the original GUI as it has a sober and calm look and I wouldn't mind a new GUI, but there are a lot of imperfections especially in shoddy text placement that makes it look unfinished. It's quite easy to tell the difference between GNUstep and NeXTStep screenshots, just by looking at how carefully text and elements are arranged. Would it not be a good idea to embrace a scheme that says that you keep going with refining a specific feature until it's perfect, before moving on to the next, so it doesn't come back and bite you in the behind later? 7) Make GNUstep friendly with other environments like GNOME, KDE, Windows and etc. Make sure that GNUstep functions sanely in these environments. This might mean that we need to have behaviors for each different environment. How to implement this is unclear, but it's something that I believe would make the user experience better overall. I've been observing GNUstep for some time now and if there's something that I see open source projects suffer from, it's a lack of focus and trying to do too much at the same time. GNUstep is no different in this matter and I think also that is why it has not come any further than it has. Spending time making GNUstep working with Gnome and KDE and all the other desktop environments gives absolutely no advantage to GNUstep at all at this time. It would make sense if GNUstep had a killer office package that Gnome, KDE or Windows users really want to run, but the amount of killer apps are rather limited at this time. Doing this now will show everyone that GNUstep is just trying to play catch up and that the developers are spending their time to make TalkSoup look somewhat integrated into someone else's desktop environment. Is there a future in that? Would developers then start developing for GNUstep? I don't think so. I think it would be much better to focus now on getting a decent desktop environment out of GNUstep powered programs alone. Make a desktop environment that runs flawlessly off an installable live CD, one that shows that GNUstep can give life to a PC all on its own without the help of KDE, Gnome or whatever. It should be a live CD that would allow a user to be productive and creative and would impress other people than just a few objective C developers. When that happens, people will see that it's a system that can be worth learning to develop for and you will get much more notice than doing the other thing. You will stand out of the crowd. The current live CD is the right direction, but it needs a lot more work. I now ask these questions: What was the original goal of NeXT with their OS? Should that goal not also be the same for GNUstep? -- Regards, Henrik Mikael Kristensen ___ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
Re: Plans for change....
Henrik, > I like the original GUI as it has a sober and calm look and I > wouldn't mind a new GUI, but there are a lot of imperfections > especially in shoddy text placement that makes it look unfinished. > It's quite easy to tell the difference between GNUstep and NeXTStep > screenshots, just by looking at how carefully text and elements are > arranged. If you convert the gui of an application from NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP to GNUstep using nib2gmodel and Gorm it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the two. For example, look at Cenon. This application worked on OPENSTEP for years. It was ported to GNUstep and looks almost exactly the same. Additionally, it is possible to create GUIs which look exactly like those of a NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP application using Gorm. I believe what you might be seeing is a difference between > Would it not be a good idea to embrace a scheme that says that you > keep going with refining a specific feature until it's perfect, > before moving on to the next, so it doesn't come back and bite you in > the behind later? When users, such as yourself, actually take the time to fully define what problems they are seeing, it generally makes it easier to correct the issues. I, personally, am not sure what you're referring to here as the text placement done by the text system works wonderfully. If there is an issue with how that's done, then it would be great if you would report a bug on the bug tracking system so that we can focus on the problem. > I've been observing GNUstep for some time now and if there's > something that I see open source projects suffer from, it's a lack of > focus and trying to do too much at the same time. GNUstep is no > different in this matter and I think also that is why it has not come > any further than it has. I don't think that the list of things that I have enumerated is too much or will cause lack of focus. With sufficient effort all of these things can be done in the next year. > Spending time making GNUstep working with Gnome and KDE and all the > other desktop environments gives absolutely no advantage to GNUstep > at all at this time. It would make sense if GNUstep had a killer > office package that Gnome, KDE or Windows users really want to run, > but the amount of killer apps are rather limited at this time. > Doing this now will show everyone that GNUstep is just trying to play > catch up and that the developers are spending their time to make > TalkSoup look somewhat integrated into someone else's desktop > environment. Is there a future in that? Would developers then start > developing for GNUstep? I don't think so. This is the principle complaint I am hearing from companies I have spoken too about getting their apps working on GNUstep. They love the fact that it can work with Windows or on Linux or on BSD, but they are supremely turned off by the fact that it looks like a gui that was invented in 1985, which is because *it is a gui which was invented in 1985*. And that it completely fails to blend in with any other apps on the platform. > I think it would be much better to focus now on getting a decent > desktop environment out of GNUstep powered programs alone. Make a > desktop environment that runs flawlessly off an installable live CD, > one that shows that GNUstep can give life to a PC all on its own > without the help of KDE, Gnome or whatever. > It should be a live CD that would allow a user to be productive and > creative and would impress other people than just a few objective C > developers. I have found that there is almost no market for this. No one wants yet another specialty OS floating around. For the record there are a number of these out there... * AROS - A reimplementation of Amiga OS * Haiku OS - A reimplementation of BEOS What you are proposing is a distro which is basically just GNUstep as a "re-implementation of OPENSTEP." While this is an interesting idea, and I have thought quite a lot about this, it doesn't help us at all, in my opinion. People would simply go "Oh, look it's a reimplementation of OPENSTEP as it was in 1985" and move on. Will it necessarily impress people, I don't think so. Also, not to mention that the software development companies that I mentioned earlier would *surely* not want to run their apps on a distro which would be a minor subset of the Linux world. > When that happens, people will see that it's a system that can be > worth learning to develop for and you will get much more notice than > doing the other thing. You will stand out of the crowd. > The current live CD is the right direction, but it needs a lot more > work. Part of the problem with the community at this point, is people who lack an open source/free software mentality and would rather point out what they feel is wrong, but lack the time, talent or ability to actually help. If you have the time and the talent, you are
Re: Plans for change.... (minor correct of previous post)
Minor additions/corrections here... "Additionally, it is possible to create GUIs which look exactly like those of a NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP application using Gorm. I believe what you might be seeing is a difference between" ... personal styles of some develpers and those by developers back when NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP was popular. Also, minor correction to this comment.. "OPENSTEP was made to act/look like the OS it was on" this was true of Windows, but it was not true of Solaris. What was done on Solaris was to create a window manager which would allow for integration between OPENSTEP apps on Solaris and open look and other apps. BTW... one thing that I should mention OPENSTEP1.1/Solaris should not be confused with OPENSTEP 4.2/Mach on SPARC. They are often confused and are not the same thing. :) Later, GJC -- Gregory Casamento ## GNUstep Chief Maintainer - Original Message From: Gregory John Casamento <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Henrik Mikael Kristensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; GNUstep Developers Sent: Saturday, December 16, 2006 5:15:30 PM Subject: Re: Plans for change Henrik, > I like the original GUI as it has a sober and calm look and I > wouldn't mind a new GUI, but there are a lot of imperfections > especially in shoddy text placement that makes it look unfinished. > It's quite easy to tell the difference between GNUstep and NeXTStep > screenshots, just by looking at how carefully text and elements are > arranged. If you convert the gui of an application from NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP to GNUstep using nib2gmodel and Gorm it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the two. For example, look at Cenon. This application worked on OPENSTEP for years. It was ported to GNUstep and looks almost exactly the same. Additionally, it is possible to create GUIs which look exactly like those of a NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP application using Gorm. I believe what you might be seeing is a difference between > Would it not be a good idea to embrace a scheme that says that you > keep going with refining a specific feature until it's perfect, > before moving on to the next, so it doesn't come back and bite you in > the behind later? When users, such as yourself, actually take the time to fully define what problems they are seeing, it generally makes it easier to correct the issues. I, personally, am not sure what you're referring to here as the text placement done by the text system works wonderfully. If there is an issue with how that's done, then it would be great if you would report a bug on the bug tracking system so that we can focus on the problem. > I've been observing GNUstep for some time now and if there's > something that I see open source projects suffer from, it's a lack of > focus and trying to do too much at the same time. GNUstep is no > different in this matter and I think also that is why it has not come > any further than it has. I don't think that the list of things that I have enumerated is too much or will cause lack of focus. With sufficient effort all of these things can be done in the next year. > Spending time making GNUstep working with Gnome and KDE and all the > other desktop environments gives absolutely no advantage to GNUstep > at all at this time. It would make sense if GNUstep had a killer > office package that Gnome, KDE or Windows users really want to run, > but the amount of killer apps are rather limited at this time. > Doing this now will show everyone that GNUstep is just trying to play > catch up and that the developers are spending their time to make > TalkSoup look somewhat integrated into someone else's desktop > environment. Is there a future in that? Would developers then start > developing for GNUstep? I don't think so. This is the principle complaint I am hearing from companies I have spoken too about getting their apps working on GNUstep. They love the fact that it can work with Windows or on Linux or on BSD, but they are supremely turned off by the fact that it looks like a gui that was invented in 1985, which is because *it is a gui which was invented in 1985*. And that it completely fails to blend in with any other apps on the platform. > I think it would be much better to focus now on getting a decent > desktop environment out of GNUstep powered programs alone. Make a > desktop environment that runs flawlessly off an installable live CD, > one that shows that GNUstep can give life to a PC all on its own > without the help of KDE, Gnome or whatever. > It should be a live CD that would allow a user to be productive and > creative and would impress other people than just a few objective C > developers. I have found that there is almost no market for this. No one wants yet another specialty OS floating around. For the record there are a number of these out there... * AROS - A reimplementation of Amiga OS * Haiku OS - A reimplementation of BEOS What you are proposing is a distro whi
Re: Plans for change....
Hi Gregory, Congratulations on becoming chief maintainer. Thanks for your work so far, and thanks for your commitment to the project. And, of course, thanks to Adam for all of his work as chief maintainer as well. On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 20:10:01 -0800 (PST), Gregory John Casamento <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: [...] > 3) Eliminate the need for GNUstep.sh, either by making GNUstep place > it's binaries and libraries in more "standard" places, This is what we try to do for Debian, in order to satisfy the Debian Policy (which follows the FHS). Libraries get moved to /usr/lib, headers to /usr/include, architecture-independent files to /usr/share, and symlinks to make everything accessible from the normal *step hierarchy. And we have wrapper scripts in /usr/bin. It's not perfect, but it works, and we don't have any more complaints about policy violations. If you're interested, I can send you fuller details about the exact filesystem layout that we are using. If GNUstep does this sort of thing, I'd be more than happy to add my input wherever needed. > or by providing an installation procedure I'm not sure exactly what you're thinking of in terms of an installation procedure. But it should be fine as long as it can work well with GNU/Linux distributions. Again, I'd be more than happy to help out with this, with my Debian hat on. [...] > 5) Focus and concentrate on one and only one set of display > technologies per platform. We expend way too much time and energy on > maintaining mulitple backends (xlib, art and etc) when we really don't > have to. For Linux/BSD we have two functional backends and another on > the away for cairo. What's the point of this? In my opinion we should > complete the cairo backend and deprecate BOTH the xlib and art > backends. xlib is hopelessly outdated and libart isn't really > supported by anyone anymore. Yes please. ;) (We also need to get printing working properly. Fonts get messed up.) [...] > 7) Make GNUstep friendly with other environments like GNOME, KDE, > Windows and etc. Make sure that GNUstep functions sanely in these > environments. This might mean that we need to have behaviors for each > different environment. How to implement this is unclear, but it's > something that I believe would make the user experience better > overall. And I guess at least part of this would involve becoming involved in the freedesktop.org effort. (Unfortunately, probably not something that I can help out with much.) Although as a whole, this is probably a very tough problem. There are a few very big things that *step does differently. -- Hubert Chan - email & Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA (Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net) Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA ___ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev
