Re: NeXT GNU Homage Project Work

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

Adam S wrote:
> Slight tangent ... Would adopting an unmaintained OS help our cause?
>
> I spoke to the owner of http://www.aiei.ch/gnustep/
>
> He's happy for someone else to pick it up and use it or develop it.
>
> Just a thought. What do you think?

mixed feelings. Why the first live CD was a nice, novel idea... it did 
not develop in a nice showcase of GNUstep at all.
Essentially, it depends on the apckages built for Debian, so you depend 
on what's there.

You have two routes to make an "GNUstep OS"
1) Take an existing distribution (be it Linux or GNUstep) and use also 
their GNUstep packages as is and essnetially make a live cd, VM image or 
whatever
2) take an existing distribution, but then build your GNUstep packages 
on top

The LiveCD you mention went route 1), but that leads to obsolete 
packages if you follow a distribution which has old packages. What do 
you do for Applications that are not packaged/missing? I would not 
suggest this route, and in case use something that supports GS with 
bette rup-to-date pcakges. FreeBSD as David suggests, OpenBSD and Gentoo 
are quite fine to my knowledge too, NetBSD was too last time I checked. 
Debian/Ubuntu sadly not.

If you take route 2) you have much more freedom.... but of course, 
different problems and more work for yourself. That is the route Richard 
Stonehouse did for his ready to use VM.
You might take advantage of Ivan's debian packages: he is working on 
them and perhaps they work fine with raspbian.

Riccardo