[haiku-development] Re: Haiku R1/alpha decisions

richard jasmin <jasminr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> you really want to ask that?
> because you know that those getting alpha, releasable or not need to have 
> a bootable os.though grub WILL do this, you refrain from it for obvious 
> reasons.its better to work all or as much kinks out as you can, for all 
> you know there are speed issues with some parts of the code.i would say 
> that is a main concern other than internal bug fixes.obviously once we 
> are up, we can tweak networking and such to our content.we can pull 
> drivers from Ubuntu or the Linux kernel if need be to incorporate them 
> in.virtual hardware is not the same and does not perform the same as real 
> hardware.interrupts are not the same and there is a lot of soft 
> interrupts that occur with emulation.shutting down is an issue.you have 
> no shut down feature.this was incorporated with 98 or better or Linux for 
> some time now.i have not had to hard power down a system for years.what 
> about power management work? cant do that without hardware that has it, 
> IE even a 486 box to test.
> im no expert, but i find that you are far away from alpha.
> 
> you are close.you got the core of beR5 up and open sourced it.its a good 
> step.i would envy that OS on my ibook right now, kde has issues and gnome 
> is incredibly slow.one step at a time.
> 
> theres a lot more work to do.seems the tracker is running like explorer 
> does in that it is THE running OS and if for some reason it crashes your 
> system goes to shit.there is a lot more stability to be tweaked.i would 
> imagine that is your first goal, get it as stable and complete as 
> possible, then branch off with newer apps.problem is the sources like for 
> o-office you have to bend someone's arm to get.i have the link somewhere, 
> their page doesn't work right.even a basic scribus or abiword would be 
> beneficial at this point.i agree, the seven different media players and 
> such gets old on ANY Linux distro. stick with vlc and mplayer, they seem 
> to cover the spectrum pretty well.terminal is covered, but lets get some 
> basic apps in there for basic tasks to make the OS a bit more usable by 
> ANYONE.even pico at this point would be beneficial.[audacious replaces 
> xmms gui in case you didn't already know....]

Your advice is surely reasonable, but if we follow it all, I am sure we 
won't release alpha 1 within the next 4 years. Releasing what we have now 
(as "alpha", mind you), is sure to disappoint a few people. It will 
hopefully also attract some new blood. People who get curious and want to 
help and see the work. It puts us in the news, it shows we are alive and it 
gives us at least some attention. I am sure some news coverage will be 
negative, but there will be other news that will point out it's an *alpha* 
FCS and that it is good we finally released something. Release gives more 
exposure. It has been said before that the focus of this alpha release is 
to be usable as platform to actually develop Haiku itself or applications. 
So it needs to be stable enough, not corrupt your data and provide the 
tools you need for development. A lot of the stuff you mentioned loses 
importance with this primary goal in mind. So I guess if we want to release 
in less than 4 years, we may have to ballance your view, which is 
reasonable on the one hand, with what I just pointed out. Hope you 
understand.

Best regards,
-Stephan

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