Re: FOSDEM and beyond (next stable release of base)

[Eric Wasylishen]

> Well, only doing a new unstable release of base is my direct responsibility 
> (there's no problem with that), but the others all sound reasonable to me, 
> though there may be quite some work to do still on theming.
> 
> I would really like to see theming be usable by designers (people wanting to 
> produce nice looking themes), not just for integration with 'native' systems 
> like mswindows or gnome.  The latter *needs* coding while the former is much 
> better done avoiding coding, so we really want to try implementing support 
> for all the recent (code-based-theme-oriented) changes in Thematic.app, and 
> if necessary change them to be more friendly for non-code themes.  Eric may 
> already be doing that (I haven't tracked the recent changes).

Absolutely, what I am working on right now is being able to support Jesse 
Ross's two themes without any extra code. It's going well. I haven't made any 
updates to Themeatic yet, but that is something I want to do eventually.

Hopefully in time for the next unstable release, the theme will 95% match the 
mockups :-) (http://etoileos.com/etoile/mockups/narcissus/)

> I expect Nicola can sort out the gnustep-make changes, so that only leaves 
> making cairo the default backend... that one might be contentious as Cairo is 
> quite new still, and not trusted by some (actually, when I tried to use it 
> last week it failed to draw any images at all ... so I'm currently using art).

That's bad, maybe I could take a look at the problem?

I think cairo itself is highly trustworthy - millions of people rely on it 
every day (e.g. all Firefox users), and the future looks promising for the 
library. It could be that the cairo GNUstep backend isn't as well tested as the 
other backends.

>  In particular I recall Fred (who wrote it) saying it wasn't ready a while 
> back.  He might have changed his mind by now though.  Anyway, he should be 
> able to give you a definitive answer on this.
> 


Overall, the plans for upcoming GNUstep releases sound good to me :-)

-Eric