FreeLists / openbeos / [openbeos] Re: Haiku distribution

[Simon Taylor <simontaylor1@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm also a little concerned with this news. Regular followers of the list with 
a good memory will remember my personal dislike with the whole idea of having 
Haiku distros. It really doesn't help to put the distance between us and linux 
that we really should strive for IMHO.

The official policy at the moment (as I understand it) is that in order to be 
called a Haiku distro people will have to include a large set of core files of 
a particular version, which will all collectively be "Haiku R1". That will put 
Haiku in much better shape than Linux - but to those new to the community the 
difference may not be obvious if they simply try and download "Haiku" and see a 
load of distributions pop up in the search results.

I've been thinking about it a bit, and I feel a better solution is to encourage 
3rd parties to produce "application packs". That will clarify the distinction 
between what is "Haiku" and what isn't. How I see it working would be a user 
would install their Haiku from the official haiku-os.org site. Then if they 
wanted something akin to GNU/Haiku, they could download an "GNU/Haiku Bundle" 
from a 3rd party website and run a single unified installer to put all the apps 
that are currently in that distribution on their clean Haiku install.

I think this approach would give a number of advantages - people would know 
what stuff Haiku Inc. is responsible for and what is 3rd party, and it would 
really help Haiku R1 to be perceived as a single unified platform. I'd also 
encourage app-pack makers to produce images called things like "Haiku R1 with 
GNU/Haiku Bundle pre-installed" - this is effectively the same as the current 
distro proposal, but I think the naming much more accurately reflects what is 
in the download.

Thoughts appreciated

Simon

 
> 
> From: "Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 2007/03/12 Mon PM 07:29:31 GMT
> To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [openbeos] Re: Haiku distribution
> 
> On 3/12/07, Thom Holwerda <slakje@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > FYI:
> >
> > http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17471/First-Haiku-Distribution-Released
> 
> I'm not sure if this is a good thing. The code is still of alpha
> quality for many components, and people could get a bad impression of
> Haiku by running a buggy build. This is of course the reason no one on
> the Haiku project has made something like this yet.
> 
> Of course since the code is MIT people can pretty much do whatever
> they want with it. But I don't think unofficial distributions should
> be allowed to use the Haiku name, especially with GNU/ before it. That
> sounds too much like a Linux distro.
> 
> Maybe Michael or Axel could politely ask Pingwinek to rename it Gnaiku
> or whatever.
> 
> Ryan
> 
> 

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