Re: Package building

[cobjective]

On 19 Nov 2019, at 13:49, Ivan Vučica <ivucica@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Nov 18, 2019, 23:40 Sergii Stoian <stoyan255@gmail.com> wrote:

Plus themes support bloats the GNUstep codebase. I understand that the initial idea was to attract more users/developers, but… It’s not working.

Have you guessed why it's not working?

Users who would be attracted by a different theme are not aware there are different themes or how to set them up.

I think we have to consider several types of users:

1. Developer - reads documentation and write code. They’re getting knowledge from documentation.

2. Technically-skilled user - sometimes ;) reads docs and tweaks configuration/icons/WM. System administrators, package maintainers.

3. User Vulgaris ;) - uses what their distribution provides as DE (Unity, GNOME, KDE, XFCE).

Obviously, type #3 is not our target audience. For type #1 and #2 should exist reference implementation. That is Linux/FreeBSD based OS preconfigured for everyday usage (development, sysadmin tasks, package building) with documentation in human readable format to make their experiments easy and valuable. That's what I’m trying to create with NEXTSPACE.

A solution is to ship a "gnustep-recommended-config" package as a Recommends of the libgnustep-gui package. Speaking in Debian terms; same goes for other OSes.

This package would pull in a theme and a systemwide plist configuring a modernized theme etc.

That’s an option.

Today, if a KDE user born in 2001 installs a GNUstep program (they may not care about the rest of the environment), the UI is totally out of sync with their expectations. And if they go through the effort to explore an entire environment, they get greeted by the 90s — whether they want it or not.

Am I misreading expectations of a prospective user?

Personally I’ve decided to define such user as "not my target audience” (I’m talking about NEXTSPACE here). Because such user looks for something MacOS-like or Windows-like. He will find DE that meets his expectations - GNOME/KDE/XFCE.

I mean, these are my expectations, and I'm born in the late 80s. I love e.g. System 7 look. NEXT look is decent to me (but just decent). I'm personally around for the programming language and the frameworks, not for the default theme.

Nextspace seems cool and I should get around to trying it out.

You’re welcome. I’ll be glad to hear your impression/critics.

Sergii