In which GNUstep confuses and ultimately disappoints

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2024-11-18 22:30:17

I’m not the most hardcore of GNUstep people, but I’m certainly somewhat invested. I’ve been building apps, lurking in lists, and contributing code on and off for around 13 years, including a job working with a few of the maintainers. I am trying to build the corpus of documentation intrinsic to GNUstep, i.e. that which doesn’t require interpretating Apple’s Cocoa docs through a compatibility lens.

So when I discovered that an app I need doesn’t exist and that I’d have to make it myself, GNUstep was the obvious choice. I could take all that experience and investment in Objective-C and Cocoa and build the app I need. I’d probably be able to contribute to the framework along the way, too: a previous side project of mine resulted in adding NSUUID to gnustep-base.

This time, however, the amount of framework support needed proved too great. The thing I want is an app to help me organise and read some PDFs, and there’s no PDF-reading support in GNUstep. Well, let me be more specific: there has been, but it’s disappeared. There was a library called PopplerKit that wraps the poppler PDF-rendering library. However the only references to that are to a subversion repo in the now-defunct Gna! project: i.e. there is no PopplerKit available any more.

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