An evaluation of alternatives to OS X - Haiku Considered

Off-Topic
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A news flash on OSNews linked to a post of a planned series by Wesley Moore on his quest to find a replacement to OS X ( http://bitcannon.net/post/finding-an-alternative-to-mac-os-x/ ).

All but one investigated replacements were derivatives of UNIX in one form or the other (FreeBSD, Linux, or UNIX-Like).

Here is what he wrote about Haiku in his list of worthy alternatives: "Haiku – So much promise but just can’t quite seem to get the momentum to be a viable option.".

Hoping he will keep monitoring progress and re-evaluate Haiku once R1-Beta is released.

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Well a quick read to the point where he talks about doing Rails development makes it hard for Haiku in the door since installing Ruby Gems, etc… is not supported due to the apparent lockdown on the System folder (for good reason the Haiku core developers can better explain). This issue also affects Python packages, etc…

See the Ruby Gems issue described here: https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/issues/1394

I am hoping by the time Haiku hits the final R1 release that these sort of issues get ironed out. I think it’s in the best interest of the Haiku platform to become highly developer friendly as that could be a boon for end-user adoption.

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dcatt, in the mentioned issue, it is said Ruby Gems on Haiku is supported in the user directory, or do I misread?

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Ruby gems can be installed in the user directory, but it needs a command line switch to do so. Python was patched to install packages in a writable place, so that works out of the box. Perl was patched in a similar way and works, too.

If you still have problems, be sure to report them to haikuports if you want to see things fixed.

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PulkoMandy,

When did the Python issue get fixed? When will the Ruby issue get fixed without the bashrc hack?

-DCatt

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Python was patched in october 2013: https://github.com/haikuports/haikuports/commit/ce92af62578bde1877a192d1fb4aec71bc3ebf3b

  • Adjust site-packages to be writable (by moving it into non-packaged hierarchy).
  • Add vendor-packages directory, where packaged python modules shall be installed.
  • Add support for automatically installing modules into vendor directory when HAIKU_USE_VENDOR_DIRECTORIES is set.

I think Ruby has support for a similar setup, it just needs the various default paths to be adjusted to do the right thing (install in non-pakaged, unless HAIKU_USE_VENDOR_DIRECTORIES is set). We use HAIKU_USE_VENDOR_DIRECTORIES when building python packages in haikuports so they install at the right place to put them in an hpkg file.

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Ruby gem’s work fine… you have to tell gem to install to the user directory instead though.

I actually opened a ticket with gem long ago to make this the default behaviour… gem installing system-wide by default never really made sense in the first place.

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…Wesley Moore on his quest to find a replacement to OS X …
hope he will find one for his needs!

I will be happy with Haiku!

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meanwhile i’m using osx as a stopgap till i can setup my workflow in haiku

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Hi all,

Thanks for reading my post. I have been following Haiku progress for a long time and will certainly continue to do so. The recent work on getting a new release out and EFI support is great to see.

2 Likes
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Though getting Ruby gems to work on Haiku seems doable, it looks like installing the Rails gem halts on error :frowning: