[csw-maintainers] Introduction

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi all!

first post to the list, to say hello and present myself and what my reasons are of why I joined in here.

I am a long-time open-source programmer and in the past 10 years about I concentrated in the Objective-C and GNUstep fied. I am both official maintainer in GNUstep itself (GWorkspace) as wll as co-leader and developer of the GNUstep Application project itself.
It is possible that you heard little of GNUstep, but it is an official GNU and FSF project.
And as there was NeXT for Sparc and then OpenStep ontop of Solaris, so I want to take care that we still support SPARC and Solaris.

Personally I'd like to see GNUstep work on Solaris 8 and 10. I don't know if many will be interested in it, but the core part, even without the GUI, is a very powerful framework used already at enterprise-level.

In the beginning, I won't be even asking for packages, I will work directly in the GNUstep sources to test and smooth things out. Right now I can't even get the base stuff to compile wither on Solaris 8 as on 10.


Given that, I have seen that the Solaris 8 packages are old. Although they are very helpful, I think that several packages would need updating. Since I thought others might benefit from that too, the best place were to work on this would be directly this project.

I know, by speaking in the IRC channel, that some of you would not undertake this and that there will be problems.
I do not want to cause troubles to more current versions and to hamper any body, but leveraging more modern receipts sounds like a good idea.

I'd be happy with a subset of packages, but those more up-to-date. Eg. compilers or security critical stuff like openssl/openssh.
Perhaps there will be the need for more packages too (e.g. because some system dependencies are just too old or for other reasons).

I don't know the build system yet, but Macjej already pointed out about possible flexibility problems.

So, again, I come in peace, even if perhaps I stir up something :)

Riccardo