[openbeos] Re: [haiku-development] Coordinating ports (#2) (was: Re: Distributed Version Control Tools)

Hello Michael,

Am 21.04.2008 um 20:58 schrieb Michael Lotz:


Better than just announcing finished ports, the real way of avoiding
duplicated work would be to announce the beginnings of a port.
Well, better than just starting a port of QEMU, the real way would have 
been to first look around for what is already there. The BeOS port of
QEMU is up to date (0.9.1) and maintained by me. It is available at
http://bebits.com/app/4208, where the BONE version works without issues 
on Haiku (including the kqemu accellerator module). This is a fully
native port, including native GUI and audio backends. I have pretty
exact knowledge on how QEMU fits together internally and know what
parts could profit from new Haiku provided functionality. Therefore I
will do a native Haiku version as soon as there is a real benefit in it 
(which there currently isn't). So it really makes no sense to start a
completely new port using the SDL GUI dependency and the extremly dated 
BeOS reference implementation in the QEMU tree.

Sorry to be so blunt about it, but it also requires some research by
whoever starts a port prior to just downloading a tar and hacking away. 
Many applications for example exist already for BeOS and these should
at least be used as a reference. For others there may have been porting 
attempts already. Looking through BeBits first or googling for a BeOS
port of the application in question should IMO be the first thing to do 
before starting something like a port.
You don't know the story behind that page either: I checked out Dscho's http-based git mirror of QEMU (note: not the official SVN repo), in order to test git+libcurl. Nobody had created a QEMU page on BePorts, so I did. Nothing's wrong with that. (pixman/cairo only provided git: or ssh: repos)
I certainly do NOT consider it my job to surf the Web and search for outdated ports of software. I am merely some user trying to get the software of interest for my Haiku development ported so that I and others can use it. But if everyone is doing this without others knowing of it, we get duplicated ports "wasting" each others' time and potentially conflicting upstream patches.
And concerning QEMU, I haven't noticed you on the qemu-devel list lately, so if you have it working and that good knowledge of its inner workings, why are there no upstream patches from you?! Sorry to be blunt on that myself.
I have no personal interest in running QEMU inside Haiku and don't intend to spend time on it; you can get your own section on the page if you tell me something to put there (as you will see I exclusively use three headings - revision X, work-in-progress and external). BePorts is not a download site, so a BeBits page with a binary BONE download is probably not what we'd link to from there. 

Regards,

Andreas

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