Re: Starting GNUstep (Debian)

[Adrian Robert]

Hi,

FWIW, I agree with the sentiments of your post.  I am not sure about 
any organizational changes but do think GNUstep on linux at least has 
gotten to the point where presenting itself as a desktop alternative to 
Gnome and KDE is not at all unrealistic, and it would lower the energy 
barrier for people to become involved.

- GNUstep is already fortunate to be distributed as Debian packages.  
But you need to install them piecemeal, and hack around a little as 
noted to get things set up.  It would be very little effort to create a 
single meta-package "GNUstep" (or maybe "GNUstep-desktop") containing 
the libraries and docs, workspace, mail, gorm, projectcenter, the basic 
pdf and image viewers, cynthiune (if it's in debian) and maybe 
eventually terminal / textedit / preferences if they ever have a 
release, together with windowmaker and the ".desktop" file suggested to 
appear in the "sessions" list.

- Something similar might eventually be done for Fedora and Gentoo, 
since there have been initial packaging efforts for those 
distributions.  This, together with all the Debian-derivative 
distributions, would cover a large part of the linux world at least.

While I appreciate the attractiveness of pure-GNUstep distributions and 
the efforts that people have put into them, the need to install an 
entire distribution can represent a significant energy barrier for 
people trying out GNUstep, so smooth setup from distribution packages 
may recruit additional users (and from there developers).

All of this said, I think some might worry about a huge flood of bug 
reports and questions if GNUstep became more widely used.  Maybe this 
should wait for another few months so that GUI can get to 1.0, a 
user-friendly "services" package can be put together out of the 
existing examples, and at least a rudimentary solution be put into 
place for in-application Help.  This would put usability to about where 
GNOME was circa early 2000 (with a better, more mature framework 
underneath).