[haiku] Re: Updated website pages online for peer review

  • From: "Jorge G. Mare" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:55:57 -0700

Howdy,

Michael Lotz wrote:
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.

I think I understand where you guys are getting at now. From what I hear, it looks like getting this page right would require more discussion and research (and time). So I am going to take the liberty of unpublishing it for now so that we can revisit it when we are not under the pressure of the release. Hopefully that's an acceptable compromise. :)

Cheers,

Jorge/aka Koki


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