Re: GNUstep Window Manager (was RE: Idea)

[Helge Hess]

Gregory Casamento wrote:
> > So in what time do you think gstep-gui will reach the same level of
> > stability/feature-completeness as for example Qt ? After doing some
> > *years* of gstep-gui development without a 1.0 result, may it not indeed
> > be a good, even if hurting, decision  to swap to another toolkit ?
> 
> The problem is not to toolkit itself, but the fact that we don't have a 
> *large*
> number of developers.  Also, you must remember, that things like Qt and GNOME
> have more commercial backing than GNUstep does.

Why do you think this is the case ? Why did companies choose Qt and
GNOME instead of GNUstep ? IMHO this is because the two could prove to
be stable, eg by showing GIMP.

I never said that the toolkit itself is worse than the others. What I
say that it will be very difficult to catch up, given that those two
environments already have the support and their (many more) developers
*are not sleeping* and the toolkits are not getting worse !

>  GNUstep gui, IMHO, is *almost*
> complete.   Let not throw the baby out w/ the bathwater here.

The last 10% take 90% of the time. AFAIK an old rule ... (if I only
think about implementing a useful text-system, my hair goes up ;-)

> > I think this was already discussed one time in the past ;-) Using glib
> > in gstep-base would at least easen using gtk+ in gstep-gui.
> 
> Why would we wish to tie ourselves to GTK?  Doing this would cause us to loose
> compatibility w/ OPENSTEP since we would no longer have DPS.   Also I would
> consider DPS more elegant than GTK.

I already mentioned this. Personally I think OPENSTEP compatibility is
unimportant now that MacOSX isn't OPENSTEP anymore, it was very
interesting when there was the NeXT product. Right now MacOSX
compatibility would be interesting, but would result in a major rewrite.

Nobody is tied to gtk. You can also use wxWindows or Qt ;-) I would
suggest moving the focus of GNUstep away from being a GUI toolkit more
to stuff which is already good, base and GDL and improving gstep-web -
maybe to focus on implementing a backend of my so called widget-servers
(XUL itself doesn't care whether the widget-set is Windows, gtk+ or Qt
..)

> > The problem is the ratio between developers/design-quality. GNUstep has
> > no developers and a good design and gtk+/Qt has masses of developers and
> > a not mentionable worse design.
> 
> I am a GNUstep developer, as is most everyone else on this list.    Simply
> because we have fewer developers does not mean we should give up on
> gnustep-gui.

This IMHO depends on the personal reason why you work on gstep-gui. Yes,
it is fun to develop a GUI framework - but this doesn't imply it makes a
lot of sense ;-)

Helge