Re: What would be the most complete GNUStep system?

[James Carthew]

Just to add a bit to my previous post. What is the "correct" way to handle System Preferences.app? is it to make a different plugin for each OS for video/audio/networking and have the user choose hich bundle to install? or is it to make wrapper libraries for Sound/Video/Networking and have a common interface to the System Preferences bundle?

On 30 October 2014 15:12, James Carthew <jcarthew@gmail.com> wrote:

Realistically GNUStep is not ready to replace OSX by a long way. I was experimenting with doing so for a long time, but there hasn't been enough changes to the core components of the system yet, a lot more focus is on API features than application features. (System Preferences exists but lacks everything useful: Screen Resolution Changing/multimonitor/Wireless/Networking(Network manager or equivalent, wrapped)/Sound(Pulseaudio Wrapper)).

The GWorkspace application is quite good, but could be tweaked to be more like the Mac Finder. It already has everything you really need. 

The big dealbreaker for me is Vespucci.app, realistically a web browser is critical to using gnustep on a daily basis, and right now it just doesn't have one. There used to be Mantella under Etoile which wrapped Firefox into a gnustep window which was pretty decent. But the subsystem of firefox it used has been deprecated so the code no longer works.

A multi-tabbed terminal.app would also fix a lot of the frustration in using GNUStep as a standalone desktop system. 

I think GNUStep is going to remain a useful tool for porting Mac apps to Linux/other platforms, but outside of that, is going to remain very niche as a desktop system because it hasn't got the desktop system in place yet. Also, I know that my above post looks like I favor Linux as the underlying system giving examples such as PulseAudio/Network Manager, but I would actually prefer if the System Preferences area was able to wrap Windows/Mac and Linux systems equally.

On 29 October 2014 09:56, Matt Rice <ratmice@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 2:39 PM, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:
> On 27 Oct 2014, at 21:04, Asiga Nael <asiganael@yahoo.com> wrote:

>> Regarding app bundles, that's a desktop thing, not an OS thing, so that can be done from GNUstep.
>
> Well, kind of.  To really do it properly, you also want framework bundles, and that requires some rtld patching to allow looking for libraries in the correct place (not just lib/*.so, but following the symlinks inside the framework bundles).  GNUstep implements framework bundles in a fairly hacky way.

In theory its possible to do without changing some rtld implementations
(glibc almost, and solaris definitely) by using an rtld-audit library,
glibc's rtld needs to be extended to support DT_DEPAUDIT I have a
patch somewhere for this if someone really wants to take a go at it...

then you can throw the framework support inside a dynamically loaded
shared lib...

there is this here i threw together a number of years ago, not sure if
it all still compiles

https://gitorious.org/framework-plugin-4gcc

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