the future of GNUstep? and all those names?

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hello,

I wrote the whole thread about roadmap. It was full of ideas, but full of
flames and offenses. I try to sum up how I see the ideas in _my_ opinion. If
someone shares it, I'd like to know it. If someone has something to imrove,
let me know too.
I'm not a core developer of course, I don't call me a developer at all,
manye "user" and 'tester' would be more correct. Nevertheless I found myself
involved in this project and I am spending in it a lot of time lately so I'd
like to hope in  a future for it. Including time to write this email. I hope
the concepts will come out understandable. Please read the whole mail before
flaming back. It seems to me that sometimes we are figthing for concepts
just because we happen to give the same name to different things.


#1: GNUstep is an implementation of OpenStep secs it is said. SO ok. I agree
and it has to remain so. The implementation is progressing and is not
complete (especially the gui/back) part. I hope that we can "stabilize" it.
In the future corrective improvments will be needed or maybe ports to other
os's (other unices, windows, os/2, amiga whatever) and to toher b
ackends (framebuffers or so). Probably there will be addidtion to follow
Cocoa, like drawers or comboboxes or other fancy stuff (I am not saying I
want this or the others, I make examples to cllarify possible developments).
This core framework (esentially being -base, -gui, -back as for know) has to
be stable so people can rely on it

#2: My personal opinion is that it would be nice to recreate the user
experience of NeXT. Following OPENSTEP, I would call this GNUSTEP. So this
implies a user environment, a desktop, a whole suite of small utilities and
applications. I'd sayd it's what comes with the "OS CDROM" excluding the
"core BSD subsystem" to use apple's analogy. Here we have many different
things
    - an integrated window manager
    - a filemanager
    - several utilities (like AddressManager, Preview, TextEdit and such)
    - some small games and demo (like Molecule Viewer, GFractal, etc)
I don't know what came with NeXTSTEP, but I think of what was on MacOS-X,
Solaris...)
    - Mail application
    - calendar/organizer

people on the list attacked each other, the two things differ by concept. of
course #2 relies on #1.

the GNOME project lately organized itself in a borader way (I think of GNOME
Office)
so further efforts in coding and completing the envirnoment would be "extra
stuff", quite useful of course
#3: Further user applications
    - Office like applications
    - graphic applications
    - internet applications (browsers, FTP, IRC...)
    - maybe a NEXTIME clone

then we have the 
#4: GSweb, GDL2 and friends

and last but not least,
#5: developer tools
    - InterfaceBuilder / PorjectBuilder
    - Debugger
    - Property liste ditor
    - etc

I did NOT intend to be exhaustive as for applications, I wanted to sum up
and categorize different areas!
I think no work on any piece of this tree is wasted effort. There is no
contradiction in one working on web stuff and the other on core stuff.
Only the lack of developers (and testers and users too) is limiting the
project. But we cannot force anyone to do one thing or the other.

I'd sugget that www.gnustep.org should make maybe a distinction between
GNUstep and this so called GNUSTEP so to avoid confusion and flamewar. I am
sick of reading "it is just an api" every time. Ok. GNUstep is an api
implementation, but there is more and a lot of people worked on it already.
We already have work in the whole tree, it is just sparse. We have a
filemanager, a mail application, even an IRC client and a non-usable FTP
client.

There are many sites, but since a typical new user would look at
www.gnustep.org first, I suggest making this structure evident, explaining
the difference in the various parts and make it clear. Then everybody can
work in the part which he prefers. No war. There are already only few
developers, should we consume their time by fighting?

Also, I'd propose do have different leaders for the categories. Maybe one
for internet stuff, one for the core stuff... De facto leaders, official
leaders, it has no big importance at this stage of the project. But it would
give an organization, also a reference for people looking for help in
developing or using applications.

This is only my 2cents of course, but I hope it helps organize ideas. it
would be nice to produce a sort of paper of it and put it on the website.

Insulting each other just because one speaks of a part of the project and
the other one of the other is stupid.
Insulting adam is also stupid. He may be a silent person, but at the ends
spends a lot of time here and is very helpful, considering time is limited
for everyone.  I don't think he would have a problem with a person managing
say the "developer tools" and organizing work there.

So have a nice day and happy coding,
    Riccardo