Re: Known MacOS programmer about WO/EOF

[Armando Di Cianno]

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On 2005-03-30 09:49:07 -0500 Helge Hess <helge.hess@opengroupware.org>
wrote:

> On Mar 30, 2005, at 3:52, Nicolas Roard wrote:
> > But in all fairness, it's not very difficult to install on linux -- 
> > at 
> > least on debian..
>
> Which leaves you with Fedora, SuSE, RedHat, Gentoo, etc, all in 
> different 
> versions and setups. Also: yum and apt4rpm support are a must if an 
> app 
> depends on a dozen of other packages.
> Debian is (unfortunately) only a very small fraction of the Linux 
> space.

Personally having developed and maintained the ebuilds in Gentoo, I
can say that GNUstep on Gentoo is supported.  I'm only responding here
for one main reason: GNUstep needs to have releases more frequently,
imho.  It's incredibly irratating to wait for a day when a cvs pull
from GNUstep repository works and seems stable for all the apps and
library in there.  Considering a good portion of the apps that are
available "require the latest cvs GNUstep," generally, this is an
issue to me.  Not to mention that a lot of the interesting and useful
apps and libraries have _never_ had a release, this gets even more
interesting.

Take for example gsweb.  Almost 100% undocumented, never been
"released" (come on -- it's at least 0.3, no?) and yet, if you try it
out, it's extremely cool.  So what on earth do we tell
end-user/developers?  "You know...try it out...and if you happen to
have developed for WO about 5 years ago, it's almost feasible to
use...otherwise...well...you'll figure it out....".  Pretty much, not
cool.

This is odd, imho, because #gnustep is possibly one of the friendliest
channels on freenode to get help on.  Our software we release doesn't
reflect thisi friendliness, however.

> To change the impression on the state of GS IMHO one should first 
> make it 
> easily installable on the various mainstream Linux distributions (_at 
> least_ 
> the latest Fedora and SuSE) instead of just Debian.

Well, yes, I have to agree.  However, I see other major "acceptance"
issues.  Honestly, they likely aren't "technically" important, but
they are _the most_ heard bugs/issues/ideas that keeping coming up to
me, outside of the GNUstep inner circle we have here.  They are:
"fonts get cut off" and "GS looks like crap".  The latter ... well, I
don't know how we're going to solve it (I like the flat grey color!),
but hopefully there will one day be a theme engine that allows
configurability.  As for the fonts getting cut off in -back Art ... it
just looks incredibly unprofessional, and is one of those things that
maintains GNUstep with that stigma of "hobbyist environment" and not
"fit for use."

> Then I recommend to fix it wrt Apple X11, I'm pretty sure this kind 
> of setup 
> is very common for Apple guys trying to evaluate GNUstep. In the same 
> run 
> Windows X11 servers like Exceed should be checked. Same reason (I 
> very well 
> remember having reported Exceed issues some 6 or 7 years ago ...).

... I've accessed GNUstep apps from an OS X desktop whilst using -back
Xlib -- Art always caues issues for me remotely.  Is this, maybe,
what's happening to you?  You probably have tried this though ...

Well, just some thoughts ... I'm going back to making my GS media
backend somewhat usable :-)  Adieu...

__armando di cianno
fafhrd@gentoo.org
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