[haiku-development] Re: Haiku, Inc. in Contempt of Its Community

  • From: Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2015 08:08:28 +0100

On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 05:33:04PM -0500, John Scipione wrote:
> Do you think that the issues with package management discussed in this thread
> are serious enough to warrant bringing Ingo and/or Oliver back for another
> round of Haiku, Inc. sponsored revisions (assuming they were willing to take
> up the mantle) before Beta1? That would most likely be the best way to get
> these changes made since nobody else has as much experience and understanding
> of package management.

In this thread there (finally!) was some discussion about what the
problem actually is: sub-optimal choice of directory names and
locations. Certainly moving things around isn't a problem that needs
several months of work to be solved. We just spent the last year removing
hardcoded directories from a lot of software and started using find_directory
or BPathFinder more (both in Haiku and 3rd party apps). We also wrote
recipes for a lot of things, so they can easily be rebuilt, should that
be needed.

I think this needs to be clear: we are not going to remove package
management from Haiku. However, there is no problem in discussing
enhancements to it in order to improve compatibility (bot for this there
has to be precise reports of what is broken), and make the system
simpler and easier to grasp (what some called "Haiku philosophy" in this
thread, but we each have a personal vision of what the "Haiku
philosophy" is - so let's try to put more precise words on it). We now
all have collected some experience in using packaged versions of Haiku,
and writing software for it. It helped solve many problems mainly with
ports and haikuporter. It did break some other stuff, but I still don't
have much details on that.

I now have a question: is there really an use for home/config being
packaged? From my personal experience I have found that it is more a
source of confusion, for example when I have an old package installed
there and keep wondering why the fixes I try to install in system don't
seem to work. I didn't end up using it much, and put most of my packages
in system. The rollback from the boot menu is a good enough safety
system, making sure I can get back to an older state of my install if
things go wrong.

So, would there be a problem in completely removing package support from
home/config? Are there people making use of it, and what are the use
cases?

-- 
Adrien.

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