[haiku-development] Re: [Fwd: [General] Haiku OS]
- From: Donn Cave <donn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:59:00 -0700
On Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:34:54 -0700
"Jorge G. Mare" <kokitomare@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From time to time we get through the website contact form "I am a
> programmer, and I want to help Haiku" messages. These messages seem to
> come from a wide variety of people, from students to professional
> programmers, but they all have a common denominator: the person sending
> them has certain skills (C++, Java, etc.) and a desire to help with
> Haiku development.
I can't offer much advice about that, since I am not sure what
would lead a person to ask a question like that. I mean, the
general environment is pretty transparent: I can look at the
commits, at the archives of this list and others. I can run
Haiku and observe that not everything works perfectly, so as
a programmer, things that need help come out and grab my sleeves
like annoying beggars.
What has been an obstacle for me is the environment. Obviously,
you have to be able to run Haiku, and aside from the normal hardware
requirements of any OS there are some extra issues - virtual machine
software, might need to have BeOS 5 and extra partitions, etc.
Next, you need a development environment, probably on a different
platform with cross compilers and so forth, and it gets kind of
complicated and perhaps not perfectly documented. I wonder if some
of these potential developers are deterred by this?
I'm only temporarily deterred myself, but I go back quite a ways with
BeOS and I can be a patient man when necessary. The BeOS releases
I started with had names like DR8 -- "Developer Release", and I could
imagine that maybe the time is not too far off when Haiku could do that,
make releases for new developers. That way, your new developer gets to
spend 100% of his or her time working on Haiku, instead of investing a
lot of time setting up cross compiler environments and virtual machines
on Linux or whatever that will eventually be irrelevant. You all have
this cross compiler stuff working already, so it isn't a problem for you,
but as a new arrival, I think I'd be wondering, why bother setting up
all that junk now, when everyone knows Haiku is already "self hosting"!?
When I can get Haiku bits and install them on a new computer - without
BeOS 5 or other required 2nd platform - and start reading the API docs
and building things right from the first Terminal screen, then expect
a massive surge in developer contributions, if I'm right. I don't know
if that would necessarily be wanted at this time - you guys seem to be
making pretty good progress as it is - but that's up to you.
Of course that's no help with the web pages. In the interim, maybe
it would help to look at pages like "Getting Linux Developer Tools".
There are already some comments towards the end about what needs to
be done there.
--
Donn Cave <donn@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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