Let me guess… Haiku is the OS, and Haiku, Inc. is the company. So many times the Inc. is not used, so how do you know Haiku from Haiku? But if the rule is always “use Inc., when referring to the company”, then there can never be any confusion.
You can say “the Haiku Operating System” or “the Haiku OS” when you fear confusion with another Haiku. But not “HaikuOS”, please. I know BeOS was named like that (originally it was ‘the Be Operating System’ but then it became just BeOS), but this is not the case for Haiku. When in these forums, you can even say just “the OS”, and everyone should understand which one you’re talking about 
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According to Richard Stallman, you can also call it Haiku GNU/Limerick. But no one does that!
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Dear Luposian, without offending you, please understand that absolutely no Haiku developer programs or commits bugs and regressions for the sake of damage, no one thinks on how better to break any of existing functionality. All these are an inevitable side-effects of progress toward the stable release. There is absolutely no difference on this matter between Haiku and any other software, including all other OSes. The only difference is terminology: while other may call it “rock solid” / “unbreakable” / “production level” / “enterprise”, Haiku calls it “almost beta”.
When speaking about software development, there is no such notion as “completed”. There is no finite procedure for checking if the software is bugs-free. And Haiku has no official feature set to check its completeness against it.
That being said, please, just for you, consider current Haiku nightly as “ready” / “done” / “finished” / “production ready” / etc. This will greatly simplify understanding of the Haiku developer’s priorities.
Some of the regressions are not really inevitable, and we definitely need to improve our QA and testing process to make sure such things don’t happen too often. Things used to be a lot better at some point, but this culture was a bit set aside over time.
There is of course no bug-free code, but people should spend some time to test their own changes, and consider the risk of breaking things. Sometimes such changes have to be made, still. But it should be done with proper planning, so that we can still get a stable release from time to time 
Work is on the way to create a stable branch, so that experimentations and other risky changes can be tested there. As (experienced) users, you can also help by testing pending changes on Gerrit (you will need to build Haiku yourself) and anticipating possible regressions, before they land in the nightlies.
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Thanks all for the explanations. I didn’t know much about the Haiku Inc structure.
As far as the original question goes, from the thread starter: The last time I compiled Haiku from source was quite a while ago, but it was pretty easy. And - I didn’t have an internet connection on the development machine itself. The dependencies are listed in the build scripts, and dictate where things need to be put, so it was not that difficult to download them to the correct destination and change (I think one or two lines) in the build scripts.
So, you clearly expected a single red button push for gratification in an instant, and didn’t look into it very seriously.
Seriously, can someone be disappointed by a 2018 OS because download deps from the internet? @gladius should really check the calendar before starting the computer. I remember when there were only dial up connections available, was a pain in the ass to download anything for the internet, but you still had to live with getting deps from the internet.
Not sure, but disappointed or not, I think the guys and gals (Jessica etc) have done a bang up job so far. The ISO boots on most of my machines (aside from my SGI Octane :lol:) and I have a few. I also LOVE the update option, which gets its latest libraries and dependencies.
Not particularly impressed with the sound card or the Wifi card selection, but hey, you cant have everything right…
So far very impressed with this OS, Looking forwards to where the next nightly’s take us. Good work everyone!! 
Might even chuck together a box with know sound and wifi drivers that are known to be supported. That’s probably next on the list
Cheers and thanks for your service.
V.
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My Windows 7 installation works just fine without an internet connection. I can install anything I want on it and most applications are self-contained or they need only one library. Some of us don’t want every device including the microwave to be connected to the internet 24/7. And even if we did, there are times when internet stops working for days because of a problem with the ISP.
I will say again: Until very recently, the always online requirement was a Unix thing, and there is no reason for Haiku to adopt it. Especially today considering Spectre and the lack of privacy online, we should be able to unplug the internet and still have a functional system.
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I can use haiku without Internet
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You can make a Linux DVD with everything included and install a system without Internet connection (it’s called Live-System like these PlayWindowsOrArcadeGames Live CDs). People really should understand Linux chose to use the Internet install option to allow users to download a minimal image and to download then only what they need. But nobody stops you from creating/using a distro with everything cramped into an offline image. Linux is about choice, not limitations.
Haiku is more suitable for a non-internet installation since it’s scope is very narrow compared to Linux. Nothing wrong with this.
Haiku, Debian and even ChromeOS wont stop working without network. You just wont be alle to upgrade them or install packages online - and you won`t do that with Windows 7 also.
You can download all the packes from Debian mirror on spare HDD (its about 40GB-60GB if I remember correctly) and install software from them. Or just those packages that you need. :-) So its not like you think, that you need network at home to play with UNIX/Linux… I staill remember days when I had to download packages at school and bring them to home (it was like 15 years ago, but…).
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You can do this with Haiku as well. Our nightlies are minimal to keep the size small, but our releases are a full cd image packed with extra things. And no, you don’t need any internet accessto use them.
For software with many dependengies, blame people writing the software, not people writing the OS it runs on.
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I know that it’s the application authors’ fault that applications have a lot of dependencies. My post was a reply to Barrett who said that this isn’t an issue at all because internet is so fast, which isn’t even the reason why people are concerned about always-online requirements.
Is there an easy way to download the entire Haiku and Haikuports repositories from another OS, put them on say a USB drive, and direct HaikuDepot to install from there?
once your system is built, you can disconnect
same as every os, except this one also doesn’t have apps that insist on calling home every few days to verify drm (i.e. every steam game, every adobe creative cloud product and too many others)
This Windows 7 system has NEVER been online. Not even during the install. And I would never use Steam or any Adobe cloud products. Requiring an internet connection for anything but the obvious (web browser, torrent client, online multiplayer…) is unacceptable.
But you don`t need… This Haiku system has NEVER been online. Not even during the install.
It is always so easy to come and criticize, this is a community project and it lives on helping and being part of this community. In the end your decision is whether you want to use haiku or not.
If you have a better idea with the packages and the universal delivery of these packages, which was not mentioned here in this discussion, then get out with it.
Nobody has any of this if someone just demands something. If haiku a purchased product and would not comply with how it was offered your criticism would be appropriate. But it is not .
For example, you could have asked for a future support of a drive in haiku depot as a source, so that you can install without connecting to the internet.
In addition to this idea would then belong to the fact that you should also offer an image of haikudepot on the haiku side next to the system image. That would not include the third party programs but systematically cover everything.
But this idea would be misplaced here in the forum, it would rather be a suggestion with the haiku bug tracker
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Have you even installed and run the system before complaining? No internet access is needed to run Haiku.
No internet access is needed to install Haiku. If you have pkg files you want to install, just double click them, no matter where you got them from: internet, hand built using the package tool, hand copied from an hex dump on another machine, …
If there are missing dependencies, the system will list them and offer to download them because that’s the easiest thing to do. But if you want to copy them manually and deal with dependency solving yourself, that’s fine too. And, if you really want to install from a local source, just wget --mirror the repo (needs a few hundred gigabytes of free disk space) and then run PoorMan (Haiku’s built-in http server) or a Python http server to serve it locally.
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Sadly according my experiences it isn’t works that way. After double click on the package the “install” button doesn’t get’s activated if there is no internet connection.
Maybe the user just needs to wait till pkgman receives timeout, if so, maybe Haiku should check if there is an active networking connection and if not, let the package install without checking the repos (if all the dependencies already installed, or if they available in the same folder where the package opened from.
Manual install works just fine, but the UX would be better with gui based offline install.