Hello Richard,
Richard Stallman wrote:
Congratulations on the new release.
Thanks for your kind words.
GWorkspace (and combined with latest GNUstep Core) really got more
usable and stable with this release.
Is there an up-to-date list of the features that GNUstep needs and lacks?
I would like to see it.
A lot of people would answer (and did) comparing to Apple and missing
features. I would to stress some pain points which we need regardless,
especially since it is my opinion that Apple is diverging and either we
get e.g. Swift in GCC or Clang or it makes little sense to pursue that
road too wildly, the future of Cocoa might be uncertain.
We have several bugs in GNUstep and in some major applications, but let
me share some concerns looking at GNUstep in the context of GNU and Open
Source in its future.
1) Continued GCC support, with (gradual?) adoption of features missing
in the runtime as well as bug fixes and certainty of support. This is an
important issue for GNU, or, as you know, we can only use clang for
them. We still support GCC, but it is not acceptable that it is stuck in
time.
2) printing. Of the "classic" OpenStep/Cocoa features, this is the
biggest issue we have, it goes hand in hand with bad PostScript generation
3) Future of Cairo as a backend. Cairo itself seems in "maintenance"
4) Wayland backend. We all love X11, but several distribution go the
Wayland path. First tests show that the X11 containers provided don't
work well with GNUstep. We either fix that or in the long run need a
native Backend for it
Note: this is just a thought for the future. I am not advocating
dropping support for GCC, PostScript, Cairo, X11 or whatsoever, but be
ready to extend to more, as in portable spirit.
Regards,
Riccardo
