I would like to share with you a list I made of all the steps I think need to be made from now to a release of alpha 1. Before I do this, I would like an informed opinion from you of where we stand. I know we have a 'it is done when it is done' mentality, but without actually defining 'done', we could wait a long time.
As an outsider, I'd say two things are quite important for an alpha 1 release - one from the developer's perspective, the other from the 'user'/hobbyist/enthusiast perspective.
1) For devs: the obvious self-hosting thing. Axel and others have mentioned this one quite a few times, and since an alpha can be seen as a developer release, it would make sense to have this in place. People interested in Haiku development could develop in Haiku itself. Seeing I'm no developer myself (no shit), I have little idea on where Haiku stands on this one.
2) For 'users'/hobbyists/enthusiasts: some installer/partitioner of some kind. Haiku running native, installed 'by itself', would make it a lot of ordinary users (non-devs) interested in Haiku - instead of people who try the VMware image once and forget about it. These are the people that create mindshare, but these are generally also the people that do not have the knowledge, nor the will, to create partitions under Linux, format them, copy the Haiku tree over, make it bootable, etc. This process needs to be doable from the alpha 1 CD itself.
Then again, I'm relatively unknown with release processes and the likes, so feel free to tear the reasoning above apart.
Thom
