Talk:Roadmap

Arobert writes: There are many parts of GUI that are not finished, though they do not come up as often in applications as the parts that are finished. They are marked in the code by "//FIXME" usually. One example is handling of scrollbars of multiple widths. OpenStep provides for both two fixed scrollbar widths (normal and small) and a variable-width option. Neither are supported in GUI (but are not used that often).

Is that a "show stopper" for the 1.0 release? Stefan Urbanek 09:18, 23 Feb 2005 (CET)

What needs to be done for GNUstep 1.0? Can someone provide a check-list? In the checklist, please provide a severity of the task, whether it is a blocker or if we can live without that.

There are many parts of GUI that are not finished, though they do not come up as often in applications as the parts that are finished. They are marked in the code by "//FIXME" usually. One example is handling of scrollbars of multiple widths. OpenStep provides for both two fixed scrollbar widths (normal and small) and a variable-width option. Neither are supported in GUI (but are not used that often).

Base is almost entirely complete, excepting some Number formatting capabilities and maybe a couple of other things listed in the bug tracker.

Clarifications

1) GNUstep RTE shouldn't include -make.

2) It should only include

   -base
   -gui
   -back

  that is all that is needed for the run-time environment so that is all that should be there.

3) The Developer Environment is a little trickier. It needs:

   -runtime environment
   -make
   -Project Center
   -Gorm
   -Easy Diff would be good & we have it anyway.

Packaging

It is up to the distros to package for their system. We certainly can provide docs and guides to help make things easier and better but it remains that we're the upstream provider.

Many distros will not want a GNUstep Developer Environment package per se. They'll want it split into several packages, possibly with a meta-package for convenience. There are too many variations and decisions to be made about packaging for there to be a single distribution, especially in binary format.

Source Distro idea

The only distribution provided by the project itself should be the source distribution. GNUstep Startup is the 'package tool' for this. We want the source distro to be - download and untar where-ever - cd to Startup and execute InstallGNUstep

For this to work, the Startup system will need to be enhanced to build a more complete environment. It'll need to check to see what is available and what the OS is (for FS layout) and do appropriate things from there. Maybe it needs to get information from a simple configuration file which a user can edit to specify what they want?

Comments on clarifications

GNUstep RTE - Well, i think, that there should be some kind of 'launcher' application too. Some very simple app that can list and launch installed GNUstep applications. Something that can be described as computer-human interface to the gnustep environment

Packagers - I agree, that packaging should be matter of host operating system. However! GNUstep shuold have mechanisms and/or tools for managing GNUstep 'packages' such as applications and frameworks. The packages belong to the GNUstep Env., not to the host operating system, therefore installing an application can be compared to adding a new macro to the MS Word. Yes, it is very extreme analogy, however GNUstep is stand-alone guest environment interacting with its surroundings. Applications, frameworks and bundles are in fact 'modules' or 'plug-ins' of one environment.

--Stefan Urbanek 15:13, 14 Mar 2005 (CET)