[haiku-development] Re: What's the status of Haiku?
- From: pulkomandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2014 11:28:45 +0200
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 10:59:17AM +0200, that way wrote:
> >> Regarding other kernel features like better scheduling or
> >> core migration I believe we need to set up a team and pay
> >> to have those features but they are not that urgent, if
> >> you want to do heavy video or audio editing right now you
> >> better move to Windows or Mac.
>
> having to pay people for basic work like that is not a sign of a healthy open
> source project.
>
> in fact i stopped doing my donations to Haiku when I realized that ALL the
> money went into paying some guy to spend all his work on a webkit port
> (which seems to take forever)
>
> i can't think of worse prioritizing. a browser isn't very useful when you
> can't connect to the internet because your nic isn't supported, and, when
> connected, it renders like syrup because the gpu isn't supported.
>
> this project needs a leader (Michael, please come back)
>
What should I work on, please?
I'm using Haiku full-time and the web browser was my main problem with
it, which lead to me suggesting this contract. I think things are in a
much better state now, so maybe it's time I switch to other tasks
(preferably within my skill range).
We can call the WebKit contract "done". At this point we have a
reasonably stable browser which can be kept up to date with the trunk of
WebKit without too much effort (this alone certainly doesn't need a full
time contract now).
The current plan on my side is to move to the new WebKit2 API where all
the fun in WebKit currently happens, and get our port upstreamed
(complete with buildbot and everything this time) so the people at
WebKit can also help us keeping it up to date. This is indeed a more
long-term effort and maybe there are more important things to work on.
Note however that there is more to this work than just the web browser.
Over the past year I also worked on existing parts of the API (mainly on
the app_server side) which can also benefit other applications. And new
APIs (the whole "Services Kit" stuff, an API for managing HTTP and other
protocols easily and using them in applications). This gave birth to
some interesting demos (BlogPositive for example) and will make future
development of web-services based apps much easier. The idea is to
continue this way with the "BWebView" API, finally exposing our WebKit
port to other apps so they can embed HTML rendering easily (an obvious
use for this is in our mail client, but I'm sure other apps will need it
too).
Without such modern APIs, there is no way anyone is going to start
developing apps for Haiku. And without some minimal functionality (at
least an half-decent web browser), there would be no users for those
apps anyway. So, these tasks sound like they are rather important for
the Haiku project. I will upload a new release shortly, which I think we
can call "final". It disable the changes I did in 1.4.1 that proven to
be too slow without a GPU. So we now have a browser with support for the
most often used HTML5 features, and which renders pages at an acceptable
speed. Of course there's always more work to do to improve things, but
you're right, maybe it's enough work done on this already and it's time
I switch my efforts to other tasks.
So, let's see what are the possible alternatives. Unfortunately, I can't
easily help you with your NIC if it isn't working. The one I have on
this computer does work. I already wrote native network card drivers
(for Davicom USB to ethernet adapters), and I could write more (or
import some from FreeBSD) if I had access to the hardware to test them.
I ordered just this week a new computer with USB3 ports, I'll probably
have a look at getting those to work, as this seems to be a recurring
problem with booting Haiku.
There's also the question of 3D acceleration. I don't think this is an
essential feature of the OS, but maybe too much years of using low-spec
graphics card and non-mainstream OSes make me biased on that. But I
could stop work on the web browser and focus on getting that running if
people think that's what I should be doing (and Haiku, Inc. agrees, of
course).
Maybe there are other suggestions around? What should I do next?
--
Adrien.
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