[openbeos] Re: news: development mailing list, distro guidelines

  • From: "Jorge G. Mare (a.k.a. Koki)" <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 12:01:54 -0700

Hi,

Urias McCullough wrote:

Yes, there are some people
out there giving Haiku seminars at universities and even at work, and
for them it would be great if they could easily churn out a few CDs with
some additional stuff such as the development tools, and maybe even some
additional documentation.


This, unfortunately, is not must of a reality yet :( GCC does run
under Haiku, but when trying to build anything bigger than a couple of
small source files, it tends to go south I think.
A CD could include a Haiku demo VM image, and separately (not in the VM) the development tools and even some documentation, such as a copy of the getting started pages, for example. 


Haiku already has test images available (both HDD and VMWare); a demo
CD/image for a conference/seminar/etc. would only be an extension of
that, with the same intended audience but a bit more demonstrative of
what it can do, and better suited for the event or a non-English
audience where appropriate. Even if Haiku had an official base distro
today, that will not change the fact that it can be enhanced as a
demo/promo tool by a few harmless additions.


I think the problem is that "few harmless additions" is subjective.
Some may consider an addition harmless, while others may feel it is
distasteful or inappropriate for the Haiku image.
How about "apps that have been tested and are known to be functional" then? :)
I am really not talking about taste, but rather functionality. There is community knowledge of certain apps being quite functional in Haiku, such as Vision, BeShare, FTP+, WonderBrush, Transmission, CL-AMP, etc.. The inclusion of (some of) these apps would not be harmful but rather enhance the effect of the demo, by showing the capabilities of the OS beyond the bundled apps. 


At this point, I have to assume that the only thing that can be
distributed with the Haiku name and logo intact are the images created
from a virgin build of Haiku. Given the guidelines, possibly this
means supporters will be forced to release this side-by-side with
their "customized" version (where the logo and name have been
removed)? That almost correlates with some recent mentions of a
"second CD" containing apps, etc. that separate distributions can use
to separate their customizations from the base distro.
This seems to me like too much bureaucratic burden being imposed on efforts whose only goal is to help promote Haiku for no tangible benefit. 


Localized distributions are even trickier. In these cases, it would
probably be mostly a localized font and input methods (Japanese) and
localized strings. Since Haiku doesn't currently have any built-in
localization support, community members who wish to maintain separate
localized versions are subjected to the same guidelines as other
distros - even if they change nothing else in the system.

It would be nice if there was a program where distribution authors
could seek some type of "authorization" to use the Haiku name/logo for
non-nefarious purposes :)


You keep equating a demo to a distro, which is not necessarily the case.

Cheers,

Koki

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. haiku
  3. Archive
  4. 05-2007