Re: Kickstarter was not successful... but it did help things...

[Doug Simons]

On Sep 12, 2013, at 11:52 AM, Doc O'Leary wrote:

> In article <mailman.1962.1379003464.10748.discuss-gnustep@gnu.org>,
> Doug Simons <doug.simons@testplant.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sep 12, 2013, at 4:03 AM, David Chisnall wrote:
>> 
>>> We could almost certainly provide them with an automated tool that they can 
>>> run on their codebase that would give them a pretty clear idea of the OS X 
>>> APIs that they use.  Actually, providing such a tool with the ability to 
>>> produce a report against the current version of GNUstep showing what is 
>>> missing would be very helpful for a lot of projects.
>> 
>> If such a tool could be produced, I think it would be a tremendous asset for 
>> GNUstep. I suspect there are plenty of developers of applications for OS X 
>> who would be interested in porting to GNUstep but are put off by the 
>> daunting 
>> task involved in making the effort, especially knowing that there are almost 
>> certainly some things missing but not knowing how extensive those gaps might 
>> be.
> 
> I disagree.  What you want to do is engage developers as much as 
> possible with as little effort as possible.  Don't give them a tool that 
> has them holding GNUstep at arms length like a stinky diaper.  Instead, 
> you have to make the porting effort less daunting from the get-go.  Or, 
> rather, make the effort in line with the reward.  Like Graham said, many 
> developers won't be bothered with even zero effort mainly, I think, 
> because they expect zero reward.

I think any Cocoa developer who discovers GNUstep and begins to consider using 
it to port their app will immediately be asking questions like "Does it work?", 
"How complete is it?", "Will it do what I need for my app?". They will likely 
be highly skeptical about GNUstep and not believe that it will simply work as a 
Cocoa replacement. Reading that GNUstep implements 80% of Cocoa (or whatever) 
is almost completely useless information, and means that it will take them 
considerable effort to even figure out whether it's worth looking at in more 
depth. If there is a tool that can quickly give them a concrete indication of 
approximately how much effort might be involved, I think it would go a long way 
toward easing their entry into GNUstep. So I don't understand why you think 
such a tool would have them looking at GNUstep like a stinky diaper. I think 
they will see it that way right from the start, and the tool will help them get 
past the stinkiness and move ahead with a clearer idea of the reality. But 
that's just my opinion. :-)

I totally agree that making it all less daunting from the get-go is important. 
Another critically important piece of that, IMHO, would be to simplify the 
build process. Either make it as easy as possible to build a GNUstep app from 
within Xcode, or if that's not feasible, make the build process for Cocoa apps 
on Windows/Linux as close to one-click as possible. For me, at least, I would 
want to start the process off with specific compile errors showing the parts of 
my code that need work, rather than fighting with installing, configuring, and 
setting up the environment for many hours.

Doug