RE: Some thoughts about GS

[ian . mondragon]

i am bound by my objective-c/GNUstep fanaticism to respond...so here's my 2
cents:

1) i think that even considering integrating GNUstep with anything GNOME is
a hideous idea.  bordering on holy war-esque treason, and grounds to be
stoned over.  <grin>  seriously, though - not only do i, personally, despise
nearly everything about GNOME, (from it's childish, "i can do it better than
you can" beginnings, to it's [don't deny it] windows clone nature) but any
merger of the two instigated by the GNUstep community in many ways
completely nullifies the intent of GNUstep's existance.  let the GNOME
trolls figure out for themselves, after countless GTK+ version conflicts and
mounting code bloat, what is superior.  or just let them perish in the fire
and brimstone of thier evil UI on upcoming versions of slowaris. <hahaha>

2) apps.  not only do we need a few must-have applications that people will
greedily devour and drool for more, but we need applications that are simply
beyond the scope of traditional tools available elsewhere.  what these are
and how to go about creating them is the tricky part.  

on the dev-apps side we have the infamous ProjectCenter & Gorm.  we NEED
these.  badly.  we need to all put our noses to the grindstone to help out
with these where we can - with ProjectCenter, we need to give feedback to
phillipe, cheer him on for the phenominal work that he has done thus far,
and come running with the water bottles when he gets thirsty mid stride. ;-)
for gorm we need to do all of that and then some - we need palettes for all
the things our peevish little minds can come up with.  then we need to use
them.

on the productivity-apps side we at least need the 3 fundamental office
productivity applications:

        - a mail.app (as has been widely agreed upon)
        - a spreadsheet (i too love quantrix)
        - a wordprocessor (perhaps we could integrate the main components of
AbiWord?)

there is also the possibility that someone out there wants to build a
DECENT, STABLE browser for *nix os's (good lord do i detest the selection we
currently have).  anyone ever use BeOS?  anyone love the simplicity & speed
of NetPositive as much as i do?  THAT would truly be a thing of beauty.
gargantuan project involving a rediculous amount of blood, sweat & tears,
but a thing of beauty nonetheless...

on the system-apps side of things we have a world of opportunity to
innovate.  *nix has so many nooks and crannies, and most have either very
well known tools for use,or shrouded, byzantine tools for whatever that
nook/cranny contains.  we need to create system applications with our
wonderous objective-c & GNUstep API wands that simply outdo anything else
out there...and do it WELL.  we need to have functionality, extensibility,
and resourcefulness in mind.  i am currently working on a suite of tools
(GNUConfig - see http://www.dragonhelix.org - at the moment not competely up
to date) that has become a sort of religion for me, as i try to apply bruce
lee's theory of "absorb what is usefull, reject what is useless" into it;
hopefully this suite will produce something of value in this area as it
grows.

actually, i feel that the systems-app arena is where we could possibly win
big:  if we meticulously design usefull system level tools/services, then
various *nix os's (the many flavors of linux, the bsd's, etc) will
eventually include GNUstep in the core system in order to utilize them.
period.  so many things these days are written in perl that it is now in the
base installation of pretty much ever *nix os.  python (my other favorite
language) isn't, but it probably will be some day.  i say we MAKE GNUstep
completely unavoidable.

i know we all have grand schemes in our heads for at least 1 or 5 GNUstep
projects <grin>, and i'm guilty of the same thing.  i'm working feverishly
on things that i haven't announced yet to the community.  i don't think it
would hurt to have a central repository for this, one that's not a subpage
of gnustep.org for several gimpy reasons, but mostly because we so badly
need the boom in development that we would probably be better off having a
site called dev.gnustep.org that would exist for the sole reason of
organizing works in progress.

or am i just babbling?

3) as far as publicity goes, i say we all get matching tatoos on our necks.
hahahha...

- ian mondragon

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dennis Leeuw [SMTP:dleeuw@made-it.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2001 2:16 AM
> To:   Philippe C.D. Robert
> Cc:   discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
> Subject:      Re: Some thoughts about GS
> 
> > Frederic <frederic.chauvin@noos.fr> wrote (Tue, 02 Jan 2001 00:21:03
> +0100):
> > > > - in the meantime other technologies became very popular *and*
> powerful, such as GNOME and KDE
> > > True for KDE, wrong for GNOME. IMHO GNOME is a definitive failure,
> from
> > > a technological point of view, as well as project management and
> > > end-user point of view. I spent a lot of time studying GNOME, KDE and
> of
> > > course GNUstep technologies and there is no doubt for me that GNOME is
> a
> > > mess. This may be a chance for GNUstep as GNOME disappoints more and
> > > more people that soon or late will have to find a replacement that
> > > *cannot* be KDE for *political* reasons...
> 
> I agree on the GNOME part, but KDE's political reason (for not using it)
> is gone now Qt is GPL or LGPL...
> 
> > > The GNUstep team is already reusing code where possible (libxml,
> > > configure scripts, etc...) but further integration does not make sense
> > > for me (eg: merging AppKit and Gtk)
> 
> I agree partially, what I think would be nice is to incorporate GTK and Qt
> as a service/bridge or somethink like that. I don't understand all that is
> needed, but somehow there should be an interaction between the three that
> solves the look and feel issues and application message problems.
> Where Qt and GTK are close to oneanothers look and feel GNUstep is
> entirely different, and there a GTK AppKit can help.
> 
> 
> > > GNUstep is worth the investment for numerous reasons on its own and
> more
> > > and more people will understand this. Nevertheless, GNUstep probably
> > > needs more advertisements to speedup this movement.
> 
> How do you want to accomplish this. I have tried several announcements on
> slashdot and none came through. What other ways are there to promote
> GNUstep, except for talking with people (mouth-to-mouth).
> Just popping up: maybe we should start the holly war ;) Since the one
> between GNOME and KDE doesn't seem to take off. Maybe we could write an
> article for the largest Linux sites which compares GNUstep with GNOME/KDE
> and Windows and Mac OS. If we could get that posted, we will sure draw
> some attention...
> 
> 
> > And I do not talk about world domination at all,
> 
> Why not? Put your stakes high ;)
> 
> 
> > I just would like to see GNUstep play a more important role in the free
> software movement - with one goal in mind: more developers working on it!
> > Personally I think KDE and GNOME are good, they deliver what they
> promise. Perhaps they are not as elegant as GNUstep, but they provide
> working solutions! Eg. you can install GNOME over the net using a
> graphical installer, you can use apps like Gimp, Abiword, dia, evolution,
> nautilus, mozilla/galeon and so forth (not to mention all the KDE
> solutions). Actually I am "forced" to use Sylpheed to write my mails
> because there is no GNUstep Mail.app... again, don't get me wrong, I don't
> blame anyone for not having all of that in GNUstep, I just think it would
> be better to 'share' instead of reinventing the wheel!
> 
> That's true. There is no need to write another GIMP, but is a GTK AppKit
> the only solution?
> What I see as a problem is the fact that you will then need a gtk AppKit,
> a Qt AppKitt, and probably more.
> 
> 
> > After all, it is not about KDE vs. GNOME vs. GNUstep. vs. ... but free
> software vs. closed software (or should I say M$ ...grin). I still believe
> that it is better to have good software written with a not so good
> technology than no software at all!
> >
> > But to be more on topic:
> >
> > - What would it take to write a 'gtk-backend' for GNUstep? Can anyone
> give some predictions?
> > - What would it take to include/integrate bonobo into GNUstep?
> > - How are we going to solve the problem that ObjC scares developers who
> do not know that language (believe me, it does, I have seen that a lot in
> the OPENSTEP/Mac OS X business)?
> 
> That is one of the major issues. Maybe we should rename it to something
> fancy like perl, or phyton ;)
> Serious though, I named the above two because some fine coders I work with
> on a daily basis advise everyone to start using languages like these.
> Languages that you don't need to compile. For them that is the future.
> And that is what I hear a lot these days.
> So maybe a lack of marketing again...
> 
> 
> > - How do we get more attention? I mean, now that MOSX is here (at least
> PB), we cannot have a better time to do marketing, no?
> > - What would it take to integrate rpm package creating in the makefiles?
> What would it take to build GNUstep snapshot rpm's?
> > - In general, what integration would be useful, what should be avoided?
> 
> I think that ProjectCenter and Gorm are the GNUstep killer apps to be.
> They make a GNUstep desktop environment into a GNUstep development
> environment. They could make ObjC into the VisualBasic of the opensource
> community.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> 
> Dennis
>  << File: Card for Dennis Leeuw >>