[openbeos] Re: BeAPI++

Adi Oanca <adioanca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Axel Dörfler wrote:
> > I don't think it's worth to bury resources into something now that 
> > we 
> > don't need right now anyway.
>       Don't you think in the future?
>       Some things take time. A lot, I might say adding the research. If 
> we wait until 
> we finish R1, we need to do these things by ourself. Or we can 
> recruit some new 
> people to do this for us at that time.

That's the problem: recruiting can be very time intensive. If you spend 
too much time there, you don't have them to create what we need now. 
It's good to look into the future, but not too far away: we don't need 
an XML Kit if we never complete R1.
Also, after R1 is done, nobody expects us to release R2 a month later. 
We don't lose the time for R2, we have it; what we lose is time for R1.

> >>    People will join that team because they know something, and in 
> > > time 
> >> under some supervision they will became men/women to count on.
> > And that exactly is a very problematic point IMO, the burn rate is 
> > immense.
>       1 of 20 is good.

No, I don't think so. If this person would start working on Haiku for 
himself (like, as Stefano said, Oliver and Christian did), there would 
be no problem at all - that's the people we can use best: they are 
immediately useful when they join the team.
Usually, it takes a lot of effort (i.e. communication) to talk with 
interested people - and in the end, I think I did not get much out of 
these requests so far; I lose mainly time, that's it (I don't want to 
blame those that really delivered something, even if it's only a tiny 
bit :-)).
Supervising someone designing a future part of Haiku is a lot more time 
intensive than talking with interested people - if you supervise the 
design of a component, you can almost do it yoursel - to be of any use 
there, you have to be familiar with the topic anyway.

>       Then again, how many people have left OpenBeOS?

Very little, I think. The only real bigger contributors that left (and 
I remember right now) were Ithamar and David. Many people wrote one 
thing and left, too - but this is still happening.

> >>Interface_kit: 85% ready. No place left.
> > Not true at all; there is plenty of things there to be done. For 
> > example, I wrote a BScrollView class because there was none before.
>       Isn't this the one that in R5 is implemented in the server? IIRC we 
> spoke 
> about this and decided it should be implemented client side. Hm... 
> have to 
> talk to Marc, see what has stopped him from witting this class.

No, that was BScrollBar. As I later found out, Marc had written 
BScrollView as well, but it was very basic and didn't work correctly 
(and it was not part of our repository, which was very annoying).

> > And some code is not finished there, too, like the BMenu stuff.
>       Yes, because it needs BWindow/BView assembly properly working. 
> AFAIK.

Not at all - you can easily do it under R5. Things like the underscore 
to mark the shortcut letters are missing completely. And that's only 
one example.

> > Some code 
> > is very weak and uncomplete. It probably won't take long to fix 
> > those 
> > issues, but nevertheless, they have to be fixed.
>       Like? I remember Marc had them working...

Working doesn't mean complete or finished. There is a big gap between 
something that works and something that works good.

> > I am sure that many of these things could take some people.
>       As far as nobody asks for help, what should I/the_community 
> believe?

Why do you think we have these open tasks pages for every team? Just 
for fun?

> >>app_server: 5 people working. No place left.
> > Not really true either, regarding that you've recently found 
> > Christian 
> > (and probably others) to find some spots to optimize.
>       Hey, he's not developing any part of app_server.

No but he will optimize parts of it. That makes him at least a 
temporary or losely connected member of your team.

> >>What else is there left to be assigned? I am *really* curious?
> > POSIX functions? Some apps? Do we have, for example, SerialConnect 
> > yet?
>       Hm, I think I will talk with all team leaders to see exactly what 
> is left to be done for R1.

For what exactly?

> >> Why is it that I don't see any: XXX_kit/server help wanted in this 
> >> list? I'll tell you: there are no more places to be assigned!
> > No, because there is probably no one on *this* list waiting to be 
> > recruited. Anyone who is already monitoring this list, and is 
> > willing 
> > to help out should have contacted one or the other team leader 
> > already 
> > (I would not believe it if not :)).
>       Well, I haven't thought of that. Maybe you are right. :-(

I think if intend to get more developers we would need other places to 
search for.

Bye,
   Axel.

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