GNUstep in the year 2009: A look back and a look forward...

All,

Looking back on my last two years as lead, I can see that it is much harder than I originally thought it would be.

I know that I haven't always been perfect, but I'm learning. :) Also, aside from all of that... I've suffered a few very personal losses in the past year and a half that have distracted me a bit from GNUstep, but it's always remained close to my heart.

GNUstep has made some significant progress in this past year in terms of stability, completeness, and usability on UNIX-based platforms and, particularly, on the Windows platform.

I believe that the coming year holds some promise for GNUstep since I have been seeing more interest regarding porting apps for Mac OS X to GNUstep. There have also been a number of new "native" GNUstep apps from GAP and from Etoile.

I think the things we need to focus on, as a project, over the next few months are (this time in priority order):

1) Stability/Polish.
a) We're pretty stable, but there are a few places in GNUstep where we lack "polish." :) We need to make certain that a lot of the little annoyances that we are used to dealing with are taken care of as they make a huge impression when someone first sees an application which uses GNUstep in action. I leave it to other threads/discussions to hash these out, but I will mention one: Menu/Window Focus issues. :)
2) Better compatibility with Cocoa/API completeness:
a) Determine which classes GNUstep is lacking when compared against a given version of Cocoa (TBD).
b) Implement classes and methods identified in step a.
c) Better nib support for writing. Reading appears to work very well, writing nibs has a few issues which I have identified and will document as bugs.
d) perhaps more...
3) Theming
4) ObjC 2.0 (this is a nice to have...) :)

I also think that it's very important for us to stick to the goals which were set out in the blog posting I made here:

http://heronsperch.blogspot.com/2006/12/plans-for-change.html

Some of the things in the list from my blog have been achieved with great thanks to those involved in doing so (in no particular order):

* Nicola for doing such a great job on gnustep-make, and FHS support and all of his other contributions,
* Fred for his awesome work on gnustep-gui and for helping to make Windows more usable,
* Richard for his tireless work on gnustep-base,
* Riccardo for work on various applications in GNUstep and GNUstep GAP which have helped to identify issues in GNUstep itself,
* Wolfgang Lux who has been a consistently excellent addition to the team since he started contributing
* everyone else who has worked on GNUstep over the past few years.

By giving thanks to these people above, I am, by no means, minimizing the contribution of anyone not mentioned above. :)

Other goals on the list from the blog haven't been achieved yet, but I believe that all of those points are central to GNUstep's success.

With some effort, I believe that we can make 2009 a really good year for GNUstep.

Thank you, GJC