Where's it going?

[Graham Lee]

Hi folks,

I originally sent this message to Greg back in March but we haven't 
found an opportunity to talk about it one-on-one since, I'm really 
interested in answering these questions though so I'm opening it up for 
discussion on the list. I appreciate any insights GNUstep collaborators 
can provide.

as you know, I'm an on-off contributor to GNUstep, with a lot more "off" 
than "on". I'd like to be more involved, and I'd like to convince others 
to get involved, but I realised I'm not clear on what the direction is, 
and there isn't a lot of guidance from the public materials. I find it 
difficult to see what I or others _should_ be doing and easy to get 
overwhelmed by the things that I think I _could_ be doing. I have a 
friend who is interested in GNUstep (I will discuss our motivations at 
the end, so this finishes a bit more upbeat) and who says the same: of 
all the things to choose from, it's not clear what would be more valued.

I'm aware that what I'm about to launch into will come across as a rant. 
Two things: yes it is, but overall I've been around GNUstep since about 
2002, I'm glad to be around it and I'm trying to find a place and being 
frustrated; secondly, I'm sending you this email privately as the chief 
maintainer so that you know the problem exists and we can work together 
to resolve it, which I hope is better than giving up (which I 
occasionally do) or airing my gripes on a blog or in the list.

The public website at gnustep.org gives the impression that GNUstep is 
baked: it's a "mature framework" with a "robust implementation" of the 
libraryies and tools. There's no guide to where the project is going, no 
request for help, no call to action for people who are interested.

The project page on Savannah similarly doesn't have any clear guidance, 
the news is out of date, and the bug tracker doesn't have any clear 
"themes" or steers from the maintainers, and seems not to get much 
triage or interaction (there are open bugs from 2003). What are the 
things you wish we had? What are the bugs that you would like people to 
fix? What is the next thing that an upcoming contributor can, well, 
contribute to? This situation is (temporarily, I appreciate) exacerbated 
by having some patches in Savannah and some in GitHub.

The wiki does include a roadmap of sorts (http://wiki.gnustep.org/index 
.php/Roadmap) but again it's hard to pull _actionable_ tasks out of 
this. For example, one item is "Gorm 1.4.x": if I just update the 
version in git (currently at 1.2.23) are we done or is there a 
collection of tasks that make Gorm 1.4.x ready? How do I know how far 
along this goal is, and what I can do to enable it?

I said at the beginning that I would describe my motivations, which 
match with those of a friend who also occasionally gets involved. I'd be 
interested to discuss how well this aligns with what you see, with your 
chief maintainer hat on, as the direction for the project.

My motivating goals for being involved are twofold:

1. having a cross-platform desktop app development environment that I 
enjoy using. I am working on an app at the moment, and enjoy being able 
to use ObjC away from a Mac. My main frustrations on this point are Gorm 
and PC having bugs which mean that I have dropped them for my app 
project, it's not clear how much time I would invest in fixing some of 
the problems (e.g. the drag and drop NSFormatter problem I discovered 
over a year ago in Gorm and still haven't addressed), and whether the 
time invested is worthwhile or whether there will be a strategic move to 
Ycode or another IDE.

2. providing a Free Software haven for Mac developers who get 
disillusioned with Apple (as I did), or put off by the move to Swift, or 
have other reasons to need homes for their code. From this perspective, 
what's missing is an API "gap analysis" showing what you can do on macOS 
10.x that you can't do on GS; importers or compatible tools for Xcode 
projects, storyboards, autolayout UIs; clear guidance on whether I'm 
expected to support gcc or whether it's OK to just use modern ObjC and 
clang; and a priorities list to see the relative urgency and value of 
'missing' cocoa features like updated gscoredata, webkit, pdfkit, and 
others.

I'm sure there are other goals people could have for a framework like 
GNUstep, I'd be interested in hearing your perspectives and finding out 
some next actions I could help with.

Thanks,
Graham.