You can take a Ferrari's chassis, dash and seats, and stick them onto the innards of a Volvo... but what you end up with will not be a Ferrari. It might be a nice car, but neither Ferrari lovers nor Volvo lovers would likely be impressed.
I like this statement very much.
Well done Alex.
Even if someone could find and pay the manpower to program a WPS like GUI on top of Linux nearly no one will use it. Cause even in 15 years it will be by far not as stable and bug free than all the other *nix frontends already available. Nor will it be able to transfer the look and feel of the *nix apps to OS/2.
I get the feeling most of the people here do not have any clue hwo the different parts of an OS works together to generate the typical 'feeling' of these system. It is a dream to only port some GUI on top of another kernel + drivers to continue working the way we did lets say the last 20 years.
If I ever came to the point where I've to use another base OS on my private systems the smallest part will be to learn to live with the different GUI. Users of other GUIs will ROFTL when knowing the restrictions and bugs of the WPS. Come on, we use OS/2 - eCS cause we are used to it as a whole. We like the stability (ahm, this is not true anymore, other systems are more stable now, only try to compile some stuff or heavy use the WPS or...), the lack of viruses, the antique look and feel, but mostly cause we are used to it and know every single config.sys line and os2.ini entry by heart. If you change the base there's only a small additional step to use another GUI.
Long term plan - IMHO Mensys (to be more specific Roderick cause who else has worked on eCS there?) did have sort of long term plan. But his plan was based on a little more realistic estimation of what can be done with the little to non existent developer and user base than on big dreams we read ever and ever again. If you ever have written some code or contributed to some open source project you would know who much effort it needs to only improve some small parts and bring it at least to a quality level users start to try it out and give feedback instead keep silent or even worse vague complaining about although they not even looked at the readmes. Moreover even if people work a long time on some stuff and get paid for it, there's no guarantee to get some useful output. Only think about the crappy ACPI before David took over.
What I want to say can be summed up as stop dreaming of 'warme Eislutscher' (maybe someone can translate this
) and get of the ground and support the few people who invest hours and hours of there private time and money to let you run your system on some new hardware still today. Even if it costs you a ridiculous amount of money like OpenOffice SS, Java/QT4 sponsoring units or Injoy/PMView/Mesa/.... license. If these few developers leave it's finally over. And trust me, if these few active developers decide rpm is a necessity today then start using it. Write articles how to use it for dummys or fill tickets instead endless discussing why you dislike this non native OS/2 way of doing things. Other options are to use some sort of rpm on *nix or get used to stupid WIn behavior not storing window size an position any more or....