Am 17.09.2013 03:20, schrieb Sean Collins:
Stephan Aßmus wrote:And this all has a substantial technical side as well, where tools and workflows need to be built to make this all as painless as possible. This process and transition could take many months or even years.If including package management into the OS introduced years of extra development, then its inclusion has made a small problem into a significantly larger one. The bigger one being that anyone willing to donate to haiku, is going to give up and walk away. I am still highly disturbed about the disposition of Karl at Haikuware and I understand his frustration. You do have some responsibility to be up front with your support groups. Frankly, they are tired of waiting.
First of all, what I wrote are just my own impressions and ideas. Secondly, I think the "waiting mode" of many in the community is probably the biggest problem the project has. We don't need people who declare they want to help and be told to search in Trac for the easy tickets. We need people who see something that sucks in Haiku and actively work towards resolving that the way they see how.
What I tried to outline in my previous mails is a larger infrastructure that harvests the possibilities brought to the table by PM. A large part of that would even be outside of the Haiku code-base. We need web developers for that. We need testers. People pouring energy and work into the representation of software, writing reviews, translating descriptions, making screenshots, keeping it all tidy and clean. There is an opportunity for people to get out of "wait mode" and start contributing other resources than donations.
When I donate money to Haiku Inc (which I only have done very seldomly, I admit) my expectations are that they will put this money "to good use" to further the project. And this has been fulfilled more than satisfactorily. This is still an open source project. All what an organization like Haiku Inc can actually "control" is how individual developers are supported to advance some aspect of the code-base. If your expectation is to hold the 1.0 release in hand within a certain time frame, then I am not sure how that expectation could ever not be disappointed. There is neither enough money nor enough developers to choose from.
I have started coding the software center type application, initiated by a mockup from Humdinger. It prompted me to envision how I would like this new system of installing software to work. A lot of pieces are needed to work together here. The actual PM framework in the OS is just one. There needs to be some kind of online platform where users can contribute information about software packages (screenshots, translations of descriptions, just plain opinioned ratings). This will be a web application, similar to how Haiku translations are handled. The software center app needs to pull information from there. Building this infrastructure is all web development work. Something I have mostly no clue about.
If people step in, then maybe it all clicks into place in a few months from now. Otherwise all we will have is pkgman on the command line and just the official repository and no stable / current release channels and neither rolling releases.
Even with a family, it is possible to find an hour in the week here and there. One needs to be motivated and there needs to be the notion that one can rely on others to help. If someone had told me that nobody will come along and code the web application side of the story, then I would have probably never even started work on HaikuDepot. I just have this in my head that someone or even someones will step in and start to work on the other pieces of this vision.
Best regards, -Stephan
