A minimal Haiku System with little more than StyledEdit and Terminal is not a bad idea, actually. First order of business after installing Haiku: removing documentation in languages I don’t speak. There are GL screensavers that crash my video driver that I would love not to have. And does anyone actually use CodyCam?
Of course the apps now in the default distribution would have to be HPKG’d separately. Some already are, like WebPositive and Pe.
the realist is “Haiku has less developer”.
how many people to develop linux kernel?
how many people to develop debian?
how many people to develop freebsd?
but, how many people to develop Haiku?
normal pc or laptop has so much Rich and colorful kinds of hardware。
and, Haiku only has so few people to deal with the “Rich and colorful”.
why not take mini-pc as major work when it is not so “Rich and colorful” .
you can also develop Haiku with normal pc or laptop.
but, it should be concentration with one market. not only company ,but community, because of less developer.
I agree with this, although I’ll probably get (verbally) lynched for saying why: I think there’s a market (so to speak) for Haiku distributions, as much as there’s a market for Linux distributions. My preferred toolset might be entirely alien to the preferences of whomever packages Haiku (maybe @PulkoMandy or @nephele?)
For example, I don’t use Pe at all and think it a thoroughly ridiculous text editor. I like modal editors (like SciTeco, Vim, and Helix) with a graphical user interface—probably the most full-featured of the editors I like is Spacemacs, which is an editor kit for the GNU Emacs Lisp-machine-in-a-box (Emacs has an editor, but it’s a total piece of shit and the less said about it, the better). Of course, this is maybe TOO full-featured for most people and I’d include SciTeco or Helix as an alternative; SciTeco is Turing-complete (but doesn’t get in your way) while Helix isn’t.
And that’s just for one tool. It must be said, it’s a more complex tool than most; the other such category is the Web browser, and I’d temporarily include Epiphany as the default in that category.
For the rest of everything I’d probably just pick sane defaults that leverage the tried and trusted Haiku API.
The choice of packages to include in a distribution is highly personal, and I know if I tried to impose my choices on the Haiku maintainers, I’d be laughed out of the room. We do, as far as I know, agree on at least two things: a) the Haiku API is superior, and b) fragmentation is bad. Distributions necessarily → fragmentation, ∴ distributions are bad… but…
as long as we don’t fall prey to the Linux mindset of including even an alternative Deskbar/shell and alternative packaging system, we should be able to keep the level of evil to a minimum while not outright rejecting the idea of alternative distros.
It secures your data from nosy dunderheads. That’s all the security I need, in this application. Joe Q. Wanker isn’t going to be snooping via USB disk just so he can share my OnlyFans subscriptions around the office.
If you go to the changing rooms at any fitness centre, you’ll see lockers secured by MasterLock padlocks, which offer no security at all (I can pick them blindfolded). Nevertheless, if I go swimming, you’re not going to find me by the trail of compromised MasterLocks, because no matter how bad MasterLocks are at actually securing your belongings (terrible), they offer a psychological deterrent to theft/snooping.
Do you need a whole distribution for something that can be done as a simple script that runs a few pkgman commands?
I have no problem with distributions personally, and if all you do is bundle some software, haiku inc can even allow you to preserve the haiku name and branding (there are precedents for this).
If, however, you want to do things like remove/replace the packaging system, make kde the default desktop, … probably you won’t be allowed to use the haiku name and branding. This is to keep control of what Haiku is and means. But it shouldn’t prevent people from reusing the code in other projects, which can have their own value and identity.
I don’t understand the question, is the toolset I prefer alien to you? maybe?
Honestly though if you want to make an image with software preinstalled you like (say Haiku with kids education preinstalled) that’d probably totally fine.
What I don’t like about linux distributions is the constant blame shifting, basically you take distro X add a hannah montana background, screensaver, icon theme and colors and suddenly it’s yours and you become responsible for package bugs because “upstream” said “no that’s a distribution we don’t know what they changed!!”
This model doesn’t really work for haiku, the haiku “base” so to speak is not split up, it is one whole to get basically. You can install what you want ontop but there is no reason to split it up or fork it or whatever. If we keep all of our eggs in this one basket and protect it really well, as an analogy on where dev time is spend, we can achieve much more than linux can with the same ressources. There is no need to have to redo all the work for every distro again.
I actually like the current way in Haiku: we have haiku, with it’s bugtracker, and we have haikuports, with it’s own bugtracker.
If you distribute software for haiku you can do it on your own, you supply a current release and get your own bugs send to you. There is no haiku distribution that ships say an old version of xscreensaver that the author has to complain about because they would be the distributor (if they want, or they let some collection like haikuports do it)
While distribution is certainly a correct term it colors the impression that it eill be done in the linux way, stealing another term there perhaps it would be better to say you release a haiku “spin”
like ubuntu has.
Targeting a specific user group and optimizing for them but upstreaming everything possible to haiku or application authors, while allowing users to simply take things your project has created on any other Haiku installation.
Anyway, that’s just my rambling thoughts on distros.
as a side note, I don’t like PE either.
Koder is nice, but maybe a vi input as an alternative would make it even better. : )
I forgot to mention that I do all my editing with vim as well, but when there was a vote on a text editor, vim lost to nano and nano is now what’s bundled in Haiku, alongside with Pe.
As for “whomever packages Haiku”: the content of the DVD image for releases is defined in Haiku source tree (somewhere in build/jam). However, adding packages there requires copying them from haikuports to one of Haiku’s servers (this is to make sure we have a fixed version of it, otherwise it would be constantly broken by haikuports updates since haikuports doesn’t have fixed releases). Adding and updating packages there used to be very easy and mostly automated, so any developer with commit access to Haiku could do it. But this was broken during a move to a different way of managing Haiku servers, now it is a manual process, somewhat more complicated, I tried to document it but everyrtime I need to do it, something has changed.
So, I think the answer is “not me” 
this is the idea about daily building ( if i do not mistake the idea.)
daily building should be more core , but release version should be more richful.
if one man like to install Haiku from the minimal status, he or she can install the daily building. then, the useful script can be shared to the world. if the man has so many power, it can do herself’s haiku distribution.
in my mind, daily building should be minimal.it should have nothing but haikudepot.
daily building should be more ““hackful””（not the code level,but the application-pre level)
but, release version should be more stable and usable-pre.
Let me clarify: I was thinking more along the lines of my experience with Debian. 99% of users just download the large, standard distro. They get LibreOffice, they get Firefox and so on. But there is also the much smaller “netinstall” ISO, which installs a base system only. You can even make it install a text-only system with no GUI at all (obviously that is not a possibility for Haiku). But it is still Debian. It updates from the Debian servers.
So what I am proposing is a bare-bones installation of Haiku. It is still Haiku, it runs Deskbar and Tracker (without those two you can’t call it Haiku anymore IMHO). It updates from the Haiku servers. It is NOT a “KDE distro” or a “GNU distro”, and it exists next to the full-sized distribution (at least to start with, who knows, it may become the more popular option). It comes with a text editor, a terminal and all the Preferences. From that point on, any app, demo or screensaver you want to install can be done with pkgman. Okay, we can throw in Haikudepot to make things slightly easier for newbies and WebPositive to read documentation. If you need the documentation in Serbo-Croatian, you install it, but you don’t start out with documentation in two dozen languages you don’t understand.
Separate full distros with their own servers will break this tiny community. All I am saying is that there is space for us to talk about installation strategies.
Good point. We’d probably have to call it something else, though. The current daily builds are very developer-centred. I wouldn’t even include GCC or git unless the user wants it.
the nightlies (not dailies) build with a restricted profile.
The only difference between the “minimal” and “full” haiku you propose is that a couple more packages are installed/activated. since installing packages is free I really don’t see the point. (if you deinstall packages like documentation you do not understand you won’t even get the disk space back as it is moved to a state folder so you can just rollback updates/ boot to a previous state)
just be very useful for the ““application-pre hacker”” who enhance the power of market.
Although I would prefer my choice of programs, I see Haiku as an alternative to Windows or Apple - you get a working system that has been decided by the developers - other programs of choice can be added…
In Linux, I go for small distros, usually with a WM, web browser, file manager, music player, editor, & terminal as base - I can work with that set up - same usually goes for BSD - then I add what I might need/want.
Filwip is your friend. I do not keep endless previous states around.
you missed my point, deinstalling is not a delete operation, and deleting states is not a normal operation to do as it makes recovering from an update needlesly complicated.
I still think that distributions are not necessary.
As I already commented in some other thread, the easiest and fastest way to customize a base Haiku, is through a script that installs a group of programs related to a specific task.
It is similar to the Spins that Fedora edits. Or like Tasksel.
In the case of Haiku, it can be a metapackage that installs a collection of programs.
For example, a metapackage for electricity and electronics, or a metapackage for audio and video editing, or a metapackage to build a HAMP web server (Haiku + Apache + MySQL/MariaDB + PHP).
Someone with enough free time could create a small graphical program, with a few buttons, with which to choose the collection of programs.
I could see demos being split into another package. However, Haiku is already pretty much bare-bones at this point. IMO the bundled applications need more tight integration into the system, rather than being separate things.
i de-install all app with haikudepot in daily building.
but no result.
it seem not so many apps which we have right to remove.
and, remove what i can do, then system become unstable.
so, if one want to be ““application-pre hacker” with Haiku, the only way is to share which app you like or howto adjust some buttons or kinds of script .
People can remove apps and other components from Haiku as they please, but the under-lying system being engineered to support them means that the hardware requirements and maintenance burden is higher. Supposedly Alpha 4 was usable with just 128MB of RAM, I don’t think that’s the case anymore although I’m aware newer compilers may have made a difference as well.
I’m shocked that the Haiku installer is bigger than what can fit on a CD. I discovered that over the Christmas break while tinkering with an old PC.
The nightly install fits on a CD though, you can use that.