Re: Plans for ahead

[David Chisnall]

On 28 Nov 2015, at 09:41, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:
> 
> Perhaps the best card deck is covered by GNOME/GTK, since even if not "gnome" 
> other GTK application blend nicely in. So for example You can have Xfce, then 
> Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape blend quite well in. No real native Office suite, 
> but for the end-user OpenOffice will fit in.
> 
> On GNUstep, because of its distinctive design, an application like OpenOffice 
> sticks out immediately.
> 
> Perhaps we could do with some "ports" similar to the Mac ones, to have a more 
> integrated look. It could be perhaps done for Firefox/Seamonkey and 
> OpenOffice. With our menu subsystem, app bundles and some integration it 
> would be nice.
> 
> Without, it would be a bad advertisement, like the original "GNUstep LiveCD" 
> ended up to be.

I agree.  The FreeBSD GNUstep packages include a lot of things, but you need to 
do a lot of tinkering to make them integrate even vaguely with typical 
environments.  For the ones that we use in the lab, I’ve configured a more 
modern looking theme[1] and the in-window menus.  With this, the apps still 
look fairly distinctive, but work quite well and people don’t complain.

The problem is the difficulty of setting this globally.  I’ve not been able to 
find a good way of setting these globally at all.  The symlink approach to 
making tools appear in bin/ doesn’t work with rpaths, so I have to manually 
replace those symlinks with shell scripts anyway and have been able to shoehorn 
things into that script.  This works well for a single application on a single 
machine, but is not really a scalable solution.

I would love to be able to ship a port of the GNOME theme that, on 
installation, would allow GNUstep applications to look and feel like GNOME 
applications *for all users of the system with no additional configuration*.  
Without this, it requires *huge* buy-in from potential developers: yes GNUstep 
may be great, but it’s not great enough to persuade your users to abandon their 
favourite DE and existing software.

David

[1] With the default GNUstep theme, people assume that the applications are 
written with tk.  It doesn’t look distinct and NeXT-like to most people, it 
just looks old.

-- Sent from my PDP-11