Roadmap

The roadmap is a living document- if you're a maintainer, please update it with your plans.

Roadmap Introduction

The GNUstep Roadmap represents where the team sees GNUstep going in future releases. As decisions are made regarding what should go into a given release, it will be added here for that release. This will help to track what features are planned in the future and what direction GNUstep will take in the future.

GNUstep 1.0

• Make
  • Improvements for Windows (see Make on Windows)

• Base
  • Improvements for Windows (see Base on Windows)

• GUI
  • Improve printing support.
  • Stable interface
  • Correct any severe bugs.
  • popup/pulldown menu operation ... sometimes (often) popup menus seem to fail to track the mouse, so you can't select their buttons. cursor bug?
    • Cursor rect handling
    • Focus problem
    • Support for NSColor
    • text fields

• Back
  • Better Windows Support (see Gui on Windows)
  • Focus issues
  • Reliable window manager/desktop interaction: several target WM? -- window manager interaction ... I want clicking on windows to work reliably, so that when I click on any GNUstep window:
  1. The application activates (shows its menu and panels, and raises the window clicked on).
  2. The clicked window starts accepting keyboard input
  3. any other GNUstep application deactivates (hides its menu and panels)

• Development Environment:
  • Gorm 1.1.x
  • ProjectCenter 0.4.x

• User apps
  • GWorkspace 0.8.x
  • Need more basic user apps
    • GNUMail, GWorkspace, Terminal, Preferences, TextEdit, others?
    • Contribute as subprojects for more accessibility or at least mirror?
    • Common data formats and DnD.

• Packaging
  • Package name, like GNUstep 1.0 for everything...

GNUstep 1.1

• GUI
  • Integration of Camaelon into gui (and windows theme)
  • In-window menu support for windows
  • Nib support in gui, complete keyed archiving support. (In progress)
    • Phase 1: Nib reading (Percent complete: 70%)
    • Phase 2: Nib writing (Percent complete: 50%)

• General
  • Make GNUstep more compliant with the FHS and other native layouts as an option
  • Maybe extract functionality from core libraries into other lightweight libraries if useful?

• Development Environment
  • Nib support in Gorm
  • Create an "xcodebuild" like tool, perhaps called simply "codebuild" which will allow users to build xcodeprojects on a GNUstep system without having to resort to writing GNUmakefiles.
    • Since the files used by xcode are plists, it's possible to do this. It shouldn't be impossible to decode.

Some considerations for the future

• Include distcc as part of the GNUstep developement environment, somewhat akin to XCode's distributed compilation.