[haiku-development] Re: AW: Re: What's the status of Haiku?
- From: Sean Healy <jalopeura@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 09:51:20 -0700
On Fri, 29 Aug 2014 01:21:45 -0700, James Leone <linuxcpa@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The second surprise is that package development has appeared to have
declined since it was put in place.
The truth is that the new package manager locked up the system to a
point that package development is too tedious to work on.
Well, given that there was an initial rush to convert old apps to
packages, it's only natural that new packages are no longer appearing as
frequently. So the first statement seems irrelevant. Could it be that the
large number of previously ported apps that were being converted to the
new package format conditioned you to expect an unrealistic rate of
package appearance?
And as for the second statement, I just came back to Haiku after a long
break. Until Tuesday, I had never worked on a package. By Thursday, I had
converted three things to packages. These were pre-existing native apps,
so I didn't have to worry about coding or porting, it was just package
work. Given that I work full-time, I have young children, and a large part
of my time was spent on figuring out the changes to the jam rules,
packages really didn't take very long to figure out.
And this is coming from someone who was against the package manager in the
beginning. If I had a vote, I would have voted against it. Perhaps it was
lucky that real life forced me to take a break from Haiku for a while,
because when I came back, package management was fully in place, and
working better than I had feared.
So I know from experience that the process of making a package is not in
and of itself tedious. And the haikuports recipes automate package
building anyway. What's left is the process of patching the code (which
would have to be done anyway) and building a recipe. And there's already a
python 3.2 recipe and patch to use as a starting point, so most of the
work has been done, yes? Or does the 3.2 patch not work because of the
/usr issue?
The number one issue Haiku faces is manpower. But problem is that the
number of people that can help out is limited. I'm not speaking in the
classical >general sense however, there are some people with
intermediate skills that under less restrictive circumstances, could
probably pitch in by compiling >applications for people to use.
I'm one of those people. I've got libX11 (1.62) and Python 3.4 compiled.
But going further is proving difficult because there are just too many
Python >modules that are dependencies that require a writeable /usr
directory to push forward.
But even before that...its a struggle the whole way, even with patches
ready. So...the more difficult it is to help...the less help we will get
from the >community.
It seems that Python wants a /usr directory and the inability to create
one has cost numerous hours.
It seems that your beef is not with the package management system itself,
but with the associated directory structure changes. But really, the
problem you've run into is not caused by the change, it was merely
uncovered by the change.
1) Python itself can be and has been ported to platforms without a /usr
directory. It's even been ported to Haiku. You've even compiled it
yourself. This, then, is not the problem.
2) If a particular Python module requires a /usr directory, then the
author of the module has either messed up, or made the conscious decision
to produce non-portable code. Either way, the fault is with the author of
the module, not with Haiku.
Basically, your problem is that you are trying to port inherently
non-portable Python modules.
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