Re: These NeXTbuntu guys

[Andreas Höschler]

> > I'm all for cooperation. However, that doesn't mean
> > beginning a dialogue with a gesture of submission.
> > Our intent was not to ignore GNUstep. I agree, our
> > first contact was more like a fender bender.
> > But clearly, GNUstep is not ready for prime time, not
> > after 10 years of hard work and having access to all
> > kinds of legacy code.
>
> This is quite incorrect. In fact it depends on what you consider 
> "GNUstep", eg gnustep-base is very read for prime time for a very long 
> time. And in use in realworld enterprise systems.

Not only base! We have a full-featured database application running in 
a real enterprise (base, gui, back). There are a few issues, but with 
some patience we have always been able to make a downloaded cvs-tree 
working reasonably enough for real world business applications. The 
look & feel was a problem indeed, but with Etoile this issue was 
addressed nicely and we are confident that this will solve the customer 
acceptance issue.

However, we are still in the process of assembling a desktop that at 
least comes close to what can be found on a Mac. Right now we are using 
Window Maker (has Azalea a dock? If so we never found out how to get it 
to work), EtoileMenuServer.app and our own Finder.app (GWorkspace does 
not play nicely with EtoileMenuServer and has no thumbnails in the 
browser) and thus got an acceptable working environment for the first 
time. However, there are still (too many) issues.

• If an app hangs Window Maker is dead. No chance to start Terminal.app 
to kill the application. This is not acceptable.
• As far as we know there is no nice GNUstep application yet to kill a 
bad process (Terminal.app + kill ... is no option for enterprise users)
• Although it is said that Copy & Paste  (at least for text) works 
between X-apps and GNUstep apps. I cannot confirm that. My collegue is 
able to copy from Firefox to TextEdit.app, I am not (on the same 
machine). We have not yet found out why. So I can't confirm that this 
works generally. It would be nice to have a GNUstep based browser 
(better integration) but I see that this is a major task

	How much work would it be to write a GNUstep wrapper for Firefox 
(Objective-C++)?

so I think one could live with this one alien (next to Star Office) for 
a while if at least copy & paste between Firefox, Star Office and 
GNUstep apps really worked (please let me know what I could try to get 
this working on my account).

I am swapping out the rest of my thoughts in a separate mail [GNUstep 
(desktop) for enterprises].

Regards,

 Andreas