Re: GNUstep roadmap (was Re: [Suggestion] GNUstep-test for quality control)

[Philippe C . D . Robert]

On Sunday, October 26, 2003, at 10:38  Uhr, Philip Mötteli wrote:
> > > CoreFoundation is almost ported. Apart from that, it's very little 
> > > used from Cocoa developpers.
> > I seem to recall seeing it used by a lot of frameworks and other 
> > lower level stuff.
>
> 1. "Well, seem to recall" is not very convincing.
> 2. If those guys knew, that they will be able to deploy with very 
> little effort also on Windows, I think, they would carefully think 
> about using CF.
> 3. What is used from CF is essentially the CFMap. And we have an 
> equivalent here in Gnustep. So porting this is not a problem.
> 4. CoreFoundation is almost ported to Linux.

CoreFoundation, CoreAudio, CoreGraphics, CoreMIDI, ... all of these are 
created to be used by Mac OS X programmers - there are no Cocoa or 
Carbon programmers anymore in these days, they are all just Mac OS X 
programmers who will probably use whatever framework there is as long 
as it offers what they need. And if they indeed use Core* then you have 
to come up with alternatives for GNUstep if you want to use GS for 
porting purposes.

Wrt Carbon, Apple's standpoint is clearly that Cocoa and Carbon are 
both first class citizens which even can/should be mixed, also because 
Carbon offers functionality which is not available via Cocoa. 
Personally I do not like this strategy very much, but then it makes 
sense from a business perspective.

> But the question was, if it is important to have companies on our side 
> or not. M$ had that. Phil Roberts doubted, if that would help GS. He 
> said, the hobbyists would be enough for GS to succed. And I said, if 
> we have the companies on our side, we've almost won the battle.

No, I never say that, I never said anything about Hobbyists. I said 
that the chance to find programmers in the free *nix world (Linux, BSD, 
... ) who would be willing to support GNUstep to create a complete, 
stable end-user environment solution is probably higher and more 
realistic than trying to port GS to Windows in order to come up with a 
full blown, cross-platform development solution which perfectly 
integrates into the native host OS (and thus not being an end user 
environment!) - all this with one goal in mind: growing the user base 
of GS and thus helping the project.

Besides I only doubted that by having companies on our side "all your 
goals will be achieved in no time at all" as you stated. Otherwise I 
agree with you that having companies working on the project or 
supporting it indirectly is a Good Thing(TM), of course :-)

-Phil
--
Philippe C.D. Robert
http://www.nice.ch/~phip