Yes – having discovered GNUstep through the web site myself, I only got to the point where I understood all of that stuff by really digging through a lot of articles and even through talking to people. Part of what drew me to the project in the first place is I’m a history buff and the story of NeXT and OpenSTEP fascinates me. The idea that the FOSS community latched onto the OpenSTEP concept and that project is still alive and well today is a testament to the power of open development and to the legal wisdom of the GPL. Here we are, 20+ years later—NeXT doesn’t exist and its successor Apple couldn’t care less about OpenSTEP and yet here we all are, thanks in large part to the copyleft concept.
Anyway, that was long winded, but my point is that I’m not a typical developer. Most of them aren’t going to be willing to dig as deep as I was and take the time to really learn about the project—not when there are plenty of other frameworks out there that are easier to get into. The web site needs to surface the kind of info the typical developer is looking for quickly and easily.
I also think you could build in a voting system directly into that matrix where developers could vote for OS/compiler combos that aren’t stable yet. Just so we can all see what people are wanting. I suspect that Windows/clang/objc2 would get a lot of votes, but that’s an assumption. The web site could give you actual data.
Daniel
From: Frederik Seiffert <frederik@algoriddim.com>
Sent: Monday, August 16, 2021 8:34 AM
To: Daniel Boyd <danieljboyd@icloud.com>
Cc: Discuss-gnustep Discuss <discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>
Subject: Re: Web site matrix
I think the web site could benefit from a matrix along these lines:
This is just a example. Obviously, you’d want to add lines for the BSDs and MacOS etc. And there may be better columns and a better layout. This was just my original thought.
I really like this suggestion! It’s fundamental to figure out this matrix as a newcomer, and I don't think there’s currently any one place that makes it as clear as this suggestion.
Would be great to add Windows MSVC as well with the note that it’s currently working for Base only.