Re: Some thoughts about GS

[Andreas Hoeschler]

Hi,

>IMHO what is useful:
>1. Getting GNUstep to 1.0 and the same goes for PC and Gorm.
>2. Building RPMs for SuSE and Red Hat (TurboLinux, Mandrake?), or  
contact those vendors to >have them do it.
>3. Building tgz and deb packages for inclussion in Slackware and  
Debian (I could contact >Patrick Volkerding about the Slackware  
part...)

>This would get people started. Which is the most important thing.  
If it is not on the CD they have
>they tend to overlook things.

I completely agree. I just installed SUSE 7.0 on a PowerBook and  
hoped (expected) to find a GNUstep snapshot on the CDs. Unfortunately  
all I found was the Afterstep WindowManager which is not very useful  
on its own.

The most important thing in my opinion is to make it much easier to  
get people started with GNUstep (get the system running, write the  
"Hello World" program). I know that it is difficult to distribute  
binaries but that is the way to go. Many users will be motivated to  
compile the GNUstep sources if they already have a running system,  
like many Linux users are willing to build their own kernel after  
having played around with a running (deafult) system for a while.

> 4. A Killer application (to make GNUstep unavoidable): I don't know
> which one right now.

Very important point. We are just in the process of porting our  
database based Document Management and Scientific Wordprocessing  
System (see www.advanced-science.com) from OPENSTEP to MacOSX. We  
believe that our software is a must have not only for physicists and  
mathematicians but simply for all students. We would certainly love  
to offer a version for GNUstep as well and thus do our part to make  
GNUstep more popular. SmartAssistant is completely written in  
Objective-C. All we need is Foundation and AppKit.

Again, if you (the GNUstep community) want to attract developers  
make the installation process for a simple development system as easy  
as possible. I gave it (GNUstep) a try a few months ago and  
encountered so many problems while building the core system that I  
finally ended up downloading the source tree for gcc only to get a  
compiler capable of building the GNUstep sources. That cannot be it.

Regards,

   Andreas