[haiku-development] Re: New Contracts

  • From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 27 May 2013 23:57:46 +0200

On 05/27/2013 08:18 PM, SMC.Collins wrote:
Congratulations on the contracts, will these see Package management to
completion. I am willing to set up a $50 monthly donation to help fund
this, but I don't want to throw money into a feature that will not be
completed.

If you asking for a commitment from us, we need a commitment from you.

Will this see the package manager to completion ?

What I can say with some confidence is that we should be able to merge the package management branch back into the master within the next months, hopefully even a while before the end of our contracts. At that time the feature will not have been completed. We will have addressed the items listed in the news article. PM support will have been fully integrated into the build system, so that Haiku developers won't be disrupted. The tools for building packages will be complete, so that HaikuPorts developers can dig right in. Haiku itself will run as well as before (well, modulo missed bugs/issues) and it will include a basic, but fully functional command line package manager.

At that time there will not be a GUI package manager application yet and other bells and whistle with lower priority will still be missing (e.g. application bundle support). Depending on how much time we will have left, we will work on the missing parts. Maybe other developers will join in as well -- e.g. there had been quite a bit of interest in the GUI package manager application in the past.

I'm afraid that's the best I can answer your question ATM. Estimating effort/time is really non-trivial. We could invest several days in specifying an exact feature set and analyzing the tasks to be done, but I don't think this would be time well spent -- as we will have to do the tasks anyway -- and it probably wouldn't even help answer your question, since I suppose the resulting estimate would be a range from a best case well within to a worst case well outside the three months.

Whatever time it will take in the end, fact is, that the more time we will have the farther we'll get. Should we finish PM and still have time left, there are plenty of other areas that need work and that I would be happy to work in. I wouldn't mind continuing my contract until we get R1 out of the door.

At any rate: Thanks for your support!

CU, Ingo


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