[haiku-development] Alpha 1 Discussion: an overview
- From: "Niels Reedijk" <niels.reedijk@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2008 10:04:15 +0100
Hi gang,
I just made an overview of all the major sentiments voiced in the
recent thread on the alpha 1. That thread had 44 messages, and
probably ended up being a bit tangled. The overview is in mind map
form. There were three major discussion points, each with some
thoughts to process. I will leave the overview for what it is, a
graphical one, and derive some discussion points from it.
Find the overview at:
http://www.haiku-os.org/blog/nielx/2008-02-27/mindmap_of_the_discussion_on_alpha_1#comment-8606
== To Alpha or Not to Alpha ==
The good thing is that there seems to be a consensus to do an alpha
within a reasonable period of time. The main concensus is to put down
a list of tasks that need to be resolved. Philippe Houdoin refers to
this as the milestone driven releases that Be Inc. used to have.
The area of discussion is in the 'depth' of the release. Philippe
would like to see an alpha to a closed group of people, but that
doesn't work that way. [my take: no matter how many disclaimers you
put up, people will end up trying]. Simon Taylor rightly so claims
that we should be very sure that Haiku will not fuck your disks before
we should throw it into the wild. Francois Revol suggests that we
should just do a read-only release. [My take: that might be a good
idea: do a read-only livecd which will only mount your disks
read-only, and which will only allow DriveSetup to see the partitions,
but not change them. People that are really interested will check the
real thing out.]
In general though, there is a consensus that an alpha would be good at
this point. So it's really the above two things that need to be
discussed.
== Remaining Tasks ==
I asked everyone to add their wish-list for alpha 1 to the release
milestone. So far that gave the following results:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&group=priority&milestone=R1%2Falpha1&order=priority
There was also some discussion on absolute requirements (probably in
line with Philippe's idea of milestone driven development). I could
distill the following:
- Thom Holwerda/Stephan Assmus/Rene Gollent thought that Haiku should
self-host. As Stephan reported: this works, though not in one go. I
would at least like to add that it should be easily possible to get
the build tools running, so I guess ticket #1739 is currently blocking
this.
- Thom Holwerda suggested a working partitioner/resizer, but Simon
Taylor would not trust a new OS on his hard drive, and François
suggested to do a read only version for interested end-users. [my
take: real users can build Haiku for themselves and install it
whichever way they want] Ticket #1822
- Stephan Assmus wanted the licenses of all the tools in the about
window. Ticket #1222
- Axel Dörfler suggested that the releases should at least be
available as live cds. This means that it should be possible to
generate a live cd image from the build, and fix any problems that pop
up. See #1268.
- Zenja Solaja suggested USB booting. That would require the USB mass
storage to work. So far a ticket for this has not been assigned to the
milestone.
- Simon Taylor suggested to enable booting from a file within an
existing file system. Not picked up yet.
- Andrew Bachmann suggested that we select a few applications that we
want to work (webbrowsing, email, multimedia) and test these, so that
a user has a base system. No associated ticket. [My take: good idea,
which apps?]
== Procedure ==
In the previous thread starter, I posted a list of tasks I thought
needed to be done. These were nothing but a mere brainstorm: I
suggested to appoint a person (or two) to start preparing a potential
release. Thom Holwerda offered help in this area. I would like to
suggest that he will start to compile an absolute list of non-dev
tasks that need to accompany the release procedure.
About the date thing. As you might know, I am a proponent of setting
one, but the consensus of the core devs seems to be not to do this. As
a suggestion though, I would like to suggest we have monthly or
bi-weekly status reports on the progress. If most of us agree an alpha
release is a good thing, then this would be a good tool to stimulate
developers keeping their focus.
Anyway, food for though.
Niels
Other related posts:
