Hello devs,
During the BeGeistert coding sprint we had a long discussion with Ingo,
Oliver and Ithamar about the future of Haiku and the problems we have
with getting releases out. We have reached an agreement on this and we
would like to propose a plan to finally get R1 out and move on to the
next
steps of development.
The goals here are multiple:
* Finally provide a stable release which third-party developers can use
* Setup a better release cycle so we can put out releases more
frequently
* Let the developers work on more exciting things without making them
feel guilty for not working on the important R1 stuff
Our reasoning is that there is now little interest for R5 binary
compatibility for some of the developers, and possibly also amongst the
users. We know a lot of people use more Qt and Java applications than
R5 ones, and over the last two years the HaikuArchives team has been
busy recovering the source for some BeOS applications so they can be
updated for future Haiku releases. Moreover, we believe that a stable
R1 release will help getting 3rd party developers interested into
Haiku and bring new apps to fill the gaps where compatibility is
lacking.
We have drafted a plan to allow for a smooth transition to the future
Haiku.
This includes the release of Beta1, and from then on moves on to a
stable R1 with a maintenance branch, and development on R2 and other
fun stuff happening in our git master branch as it always did.
