Starting with your decision in 1997 to abandon what was the GNU project's official GUI toolkit in favor of GTK.
If you'd stuck with GNUStep, the discipline of compatibility with a written spec (OpenStep) and the pressure for compatibility with a living rival implementation (OPENSTEP, then Mac OS X) would have avoided the "blow everything up and restart" problem. And you wouldn't have spent any time on CORBA if you already had PDO baked-in.
And it would have been actually following the kernel approach. Whatever the kernel might do with its internal structure, in its external interfaces it's been stable. Further, that external interface has been a re-implementation and extension of an existing good-enough interface (Unix/POSIX/SysV), rather than running off and implementing its own ideal of how an OS should work.
I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if the efforts invested in KDE and GNOME had been put into completing GNUstep. I seem to recall many objections back then about Objective-C, but that doesn't appear to be much of an issue for all the current Mac OS X and iOS developers...
The Linux world could have been a *very* different place.
The good news is, it's not too late. GNUstep is still around, the code hasn't mysteriously vanished. While it has the disadvantage of having languished, it has the advantage of hindsight.
If you are good, you will be assigned all the work. If you are real
good, you will get out of it.
Sorry, Miguel, it's your fault (Score:5, Insightful)
Starting with your decision in 1997 to abandon what was the GNU project's official GUI toolkit in favor of GTK.
If you'd stuck with GNUStep, the discipline of compatibility with a written spec (OpenStep) and the pressure for compatibility with a living rival implementation (OPENSTEP, then Mac OS X) would have avoided the "blow everything up and restart" problem. And you wouldn't have spent any time on CORBA if you already had PDO baked-in.
And it would have been actually following the kernel approach. Whatever the kernel might do with its internal structure, in its external interfaces it's been stable. Further, that external interface has been a re-implementation and extension of an existing good-enough interface (Unix/POSIX/SysV), rather than running off and implementing its own ideal of how an OS should work.
Re: (Score:2)
I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if the efforts invested in KDE and GNOME had been put into completing GNUstep. I seem to recall many objections back then about Objective-C, but that doesn't appear to be much of an issue for all the current Mac OS X and iOS developers...
The Linux world could have been a *very* different place.
Re: (Score:2)
The good news is, it's not too late. GNUstep is still around, the code hasn't mysteriously vanished. While it has the disadvantage of having languished, it has the advantage of hindsight.