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GNUstep Project Gets New Chief Maintainer

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the turning-over-a-new-leaf dept.

stivi writes "OSNews is reporting that Gregory Casamento has accepted the position of GNUstep Maintainer. Adam Fedor, former GNUstep leader writes: 'After over 15 years of being the Chief Maintainer for GNUstep, I've found I have too many other responsibilities to devote as much time to GNUstep as is necessary. I still plan on contributing to GNUstep in the future in a lower capacity.' Gregory has been a prolific developer for GNUstep for the past seven years and is currently the maintainer for Gorm (the graphical interface designer) and the GUI library. I think he will make a great choice to lead GNUstep in the future. New plans for change have been set up already. Thank you Adam for the past, congratulations Gregory to the future."

4 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Direction by Somnus · · Score: 3, Informative
    There is at least one effort in the direction of a desktop environment. Theming is provided by the Camaelon bundle.

    On the toolkit/tools side of things, the major hurdles are:
    • app icon (perhaps could be integrated with/translated to the f.d.o. systray standard)
    • the work it takes to set up GNUstep just to launch an app (e.g., setting up paths -- thankfully handled transparently in my Gentoo setup)
    • incompatibility between GNUstep services and dbus, etc. etc.
    • non-standard build system (still easy enough to making into ebuilds/RPMs/etc.) and monolithic libraries
    Sidestep is an experiment in addressing these issues.
  2. Re:Ok I read TFA by mungtor · · Score: 3, Informative

    "He says that he thinks KDE and Gnome are "amateurish" but doesn't bother to explain his reasoning behind the assertion."

    He does to some degree. He clearly states that neither look like they started with a clean vision of what the desktop environment should be and have simply "evolved" to what you see now. He also states that the code base which makes up most of Gnome is a nightmare. I can't speak about KDE too much since I don't use it (strikes me too much as Windows, which I don't particularly like).

    GNUStep looks something like the Sun OpenWindows desktop used to... Icons and apps minimize to the desktop, not the the taskbar area.

    Either way, I just hope that it will finally be easy to customize the behavior of windows... For example:

    I want my Xterm window to maximize to the vertical height of the screen without changing width when I double-click the title bar. How would you tell a non-programmer to accomplish that in Gnome or KDE? Will it be easier in GNUStep?

    (and I am sure the Gnome answer is to navigate some XML file to find the variable Window.click.title.bar.some.other.arbitrary.and.me aningless.string.that.you.will.not.know.unless.you .coded.it and change the default value from 1 to 3. Excellent usability there)

  3. Re:Where to begin? by WillAdams · · Score: 3, Informative

    Tony said:
    >Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web on a NeXT.

    Other interesting programs which began on NeXTstep:

      - FreeHand v4 (essentially a port to Windows and the Mac of Altsys Virtuoso v2)
      - Doom
      - Lotus Improv
      - Stone Design's Create
      - sBook

    An interesting opensource app w/ NeXTstep roots:

      - http://www.cenon.info/

    William

    --
    Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
  4. Re:gnustep by _|()|\| · · Score: 3, Informative

    Those interested in GNUstep as a poor man's Yellow Box may be interested in a younger, more focused project: Cocotron. It seeks to clone Foundation and Appkit, and to provide tools to cross compile for other platforms with Xcode. It's a little Windows centric, but support for Linux, Solaris, and others seems to be in the works.