Re: Cocotron

[Helge Hess]

On Dec 24, 2006, at 24:35, Gregory John Casamento wrote:
> I believe that you understand perfectly what I was saying. :)

No, I honestly don't. Maybe you lack the history / insight in the  
various "similiar" projects? Did you even try to ask them why they  
don't use GNUstep? :-)


> Etoile is a desktop project which uses GNUstep (see http:// 
> www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php? 
> title=EtoileWiki:About), not a reimplementation of any part of  
> Cocoa. So, I don't think Etoile even remotely, by the most wild  
> stretch of the imagination possible, fits into the same category as  
> the other things I mentioned.

Possibly. This depends on what GNUstep "is". If its a desktop  
environment, its obviously a fork.
Now its your task to define what GNUstep is, convince the developers  
and move it forward. If that involves dropping the idea of creating a  
desktop environment and promoting Etoile for that task, its IMHO a  
good idea.


> The projects libFoundation, Cocotron and AJRFoundation are re- 
> implementations of Foundation/AppKit. There is no reason, aside  
> from obstinance or ego which should cause so many projects with  
> similar or identical goals to develop things in parallel.  It is,  
> purely and simply, an egregious waste of time and effort.   Well  
> understood, but not reasonable at all.

This paragraph is full of incorrectness'es. Only one of them,  
Cocotron, does Foundation/AppKit and is recent. I don't know the  
reasons but it seems to be rather clear: a) other license, b) Windows  
deployment focus. GNUstep had no focus in the past.
(BTW: stating that GNUstep is a viable cross platform _solution_ is  
ridiculous. Having a way to target Windows seems like a great thing  
to me, and something I often proposed)

AJRFoundation AFAIK is just a Foundation _addon_ (like SOPE  
NGExtensions). Its more like a concurrent to GDL2, but was also  
started when it was unusable (it made no sense to build upon GLD2).

libFoundation was started a looooong time ago (~1995?), when gnustep- 
base was extremely immature wrt to OpenStep compatibility, and more  
importantly wrt code quality.
BTW: lF isn't really being "developed" anymore, its just kept in  
shape. It just works and does all we need in our limited scope. Its  
no waste of time for us because fixing gstep-base to match our  
requirements is still quite a big effort, while keeping libFoundation  
is a matter of a few days per year at most.


Most projects with duplicate code pathes I know in the ObjC area are  
duplicates due to historical reasons, not because someone didn't want  
to work together. Now merging those high quality DUPs is quite some  
work.

Greets,
  Helge
--
Helge Hess
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/