[haiku-development] Re: Pre-proposal: Roadmap to Haiku R1 Release
- From: "Adrien Destugues" <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2020 17:09:03 +0000
Here's my bottom line: I think this project is currently underserving all its
stakeholders. It is
underserving its user community, because there are no regular releases with
new features and better
hardware support, which is part of the excitement of alternative OS's. We are
underserving our 3rd
party developers, because until we release R1, there is no stable base
reference platform that they
can use to develop and release software on. And we are underserving our
current and future
contributors in the fun of developing and supporting cool features, because
they are limited by at
this point arbitrary technological limitations (gcc 2, support for APIs 25
years ago, an outdated
C++ idiom, lack of modern OS security features) and no clear idea of when the
contributions they do
will actually be in products that are "done".
There's a bit of an unsolvable triangle here:
- Apps developers wants a stable platform to work on (which mean not releasing
new versions of the OS too often)
- OS developers want to have fun adding new cool features, and get them in the
hands of users
- Users want the OS to run on their hardware, be stable, and not eat their data
So it's more a matter of finding the correct balance.
I'd be happy enough if we manage to do yearly beta release and then increase
the rate to maybe every 8 months.
Once we manage to have that working, I'd say it's much less of a problem having
one of these releases named R1,
followed a few months later by an R1.1, and so on. And eventually, an R2 alpha
someday.
For the arbitrary technological limitations, they will always be there. First
of all, releasing R1 now would
mean a plan for some maintenance releases following up (R1.1, and so on) and
these would keep binary compatibility.
And even in R2, I expect there will be some kind of compatibility with R1 and
that it would not be a completely
independant OS. Managing that is in itself an interesting aspect of Haiku, for
me at least. And dropping it for
the sake of modernity would not motivate me to continue contributing, in fact.
So, we need to move on, but we
will always have to deal with some similar issues, and that's fine.
--
Adrien.
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