[haiku] Re: Updated website pages online for peer review
- From: "Michael Lotz" <mmlr@xxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 02:30:21
Hi Jorge
> > I think the page would be great as it is if the title
> > was not "Haiku Code Base" but instead "Other People's
> > code you may recognize in Haiku" or "Code we stole"
> > or whatever, and making it clear that those are just
> > pieces of Haiku.
>
> So this page is not meant to list what code we borrowed, but rather
> show
> some of the bits and pieces used here and there in Haiku in order to
> educate those who are not familiar with our project/system. I highly
> doubt that anyone could take from this that Haiku is just another
> distro.
I do understand what Jonas is getting at here. If you read that page
top to bottom it sounds very much like "we put together a system using
these parts". While this is certainly true, it IMO understates the work
that is done natively by the Haiku contributors. As an analogy it sounds
a bit like only saying "The Haiku website is based on Drupal" about the
website. It hides the fact that what really makes the website special
is the content it holds. In the Haiku case it is the natively developed
code what makes Haiku special, not that we use FreeType, coreutils,
FFMpeg etc. These are important parts to get things done, but they are
found equally in Linux for example. They aren't really making Haiku
"special".
Therefore I'd suggest expanding on the explanatory text on the top.
Something along the lines of:
"Haiku's user experience comes to a great part from the coherent
approach that is taken when developing the OS. While it is a large
project with many subcomponents we are trying hard to follow a common
vision on how the system should work and feel. Still we don't want to
re-invent the wheel if there are proven solutions for parts of our
system already. We try to integrate outside code so that it always
feels native and meets our goals. Below is a list of components that
also mentions the work of other projects we have integrated into Haiku
and relay upon to provide the best possible user experience."
Even better would be to expand on the list itself, so that the
individual items would explain what is special about Haiku in that
department and additionally mention the projects we make use of.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not negative about that we use other code in
Haiku, we couldn't possibly be where we are if we tried to do
everything ourself. But afterall this is the Haiku website and our
product is first and foremost "Haiku", an OS that is by now standing
pretty well on it's own feet.
Regards
Michael
Other related posts:
