Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Ivan Vučica]

On Sat Dec 21 2013 at 6:36:31 PM, Markus Hitter <mah@jump-ing.de> wrote:

> > And note that this is the strategy that has not played well for
> > GNUstep so far;
>
> I could understand this observation if GNUmail were actually integrated.
> But it isn't. If you install GNUmail from Debian packages you get
> something very old and buggy, if you install from Phillipes packages,
> you get something ignoring and trying to replace Unity and something
> compiled for older releases.

Philippe is trying hard and doing a better job than the alternatives :-)

 

> Actually I'm tempted to fix this situation by providing current packages
> via a PPA and eventually forwarding these to Debian, but I also can't
> get rid of the impression here is no interest in the results. Manually
> built packages are undoubtly a honorable effort, but why the heck are
> they built for no less than four older Ubuntu releases, but not the
> current one? Why is there no interest in showing up with them in Ubuntus
> software center?

There is interest; thing is, how much work does Canonical expect us to do?

 

> Why do I get answers along "oh, NeXTstep is so modern"
> if I point out incompatibilities with current user expectations?

You won't get that from me, for example. I've tried to push for DbusMenu integration; that requires a proper understanding of DBUS that I don't have right now (and would take me some time to acquire), proper understanding od DbusMenu itself, proper understanding of how NSMenu works (and how to patch it to generate the menus in format that can be shipped over DBUS), as well as updates to DbusKit as there was a (correct) agreement that we want to speak directly over DBUS instead of making use of libdbusmenu.

And that's just one of the things.

 

> Why do
> most people here expect users to compile software from tarballs? Outside
> of GNUstep people are used to use appstores (which Ubuntu provides).

That's simply a result of the reality of the project:

- occasionally, there are still important patches in SVN

- people come to the mailing list and complain not even about tarballs, but about the state of Debian packages

- if we were to do it, someone would have to maintain releases for Debian, for Ubuntu, for Gentoo, for OpenSUSE, for FreeBSD, for OS X, for Windows... see how the list grows?

David and others take care of FreeBSD. Philippe is taking care of Debian and Ubuntu. It'd be great to create a build farm with all the various OSes and set up a nightly build system. It may be possible to make use of openSUSE Build Service (or a local installation using Open Build Service). Who will do it? 

 

> I maintain three open source projects already as a one man show, so I'm
> not exactly keen on adding a fourth one. :-)

Ah, but you ARE very welcome to step up, of course! :-) 

> "login session"? Uhm, how does this matter? I see a login session only
> if an application managed to let X11 die. Perhaps I should mention I use
> a PC not for watching window manager artwork, but for productivity. This
> means, stability, stability, stability for all the 20+ applications I
> use regularly. That's also why I run Ubuntu: a minimum of distraction by
> technical fuzz and very stable.

By login session I mean setting up the entire integrated desktop environment that users have come to expect. GNOME, KDE, Xfce launch a dozen processes. A GNUstep session, based on what we have now, would already include at least three processes: WindowMaker, GWorkspace, and the third one whose name escapes me (the one used to update list of applications and file associations). 

The important part is that these would get launched correctly on a clean Debian or Ubuntu installation by simply picking "GNUstep" or "WindowMaker" or "GNUstep-based Desktop Session" or whatever the name could be.

We currently have WindowMaker offered as a session in Debian and Ubuntu. Some people may configure it manually to launch GWorkspace and other processes they need. That's not an acceptable way to "impress users".

Sure, we can claim that users can simply run GNUstep applications under GNOME or Unity. And sure, they can; if you slap a coat of paint called GtkTheme (a wonderful achievement), the apps even look somewhat like they should. But if you take a closer look, they don't.

And they won't, because they are currently looking "native" primarily under WindowMaker. Themes make the apps look nicer, but still not native anywhere. Etoile (in its non-broken iterations ;) comes as close to a GNUstep desktop as you can get... and it comes with its own login session.

We need a login session because that way we can give consistent, complete user experience first to developers, then to users.

And we need packages -- often-updated packages -- so we can have pieces of puzzle required to assemble such a login session, as well as to deliver this thing to users of various underlying kernels and distributions we want to support.