Haikuware

21

To write a bug report is not for all a easy thing, because there is no tutorial how to do it. I wrote a tutorial for this, but at the moment it is only in german, be free to translate (anyone) this tutorial for me, so i can upload it on besly:

http://www.besly.de/menu/search/archiv/dev/haiku-trac.html

Greetings Lelldorin

22

All Haiku Friends,

I did a quick search and Haikuware (as well as BeBits) has a history of going off-line - about every 2-3 years or so.

It is more likely that the fees for hosting the site were not renewed in time instead of its owner of BeBits/Haikuware being unhappy with the every slow progress of Haiku towards Alpha.

Given that Haiku (and its predecessor BeOS) have a vastly different architecture than Linux, it is not that surprising that the learning curve (and development progress) is slower than any of the Linux distributions. In any event, it is still much faster than that of the much lamented Hurd.

23

Has Haiku considered hosting its own BeOS archive? Many of us have our own collections of BeOS applications that we downloaded in years past and archived onto CD or DVD. These could all be made available to the Haiku community for testing and repackaging if we pooled our resources.

24

Hi Pulkomandy,

Your contributions to Haiku bug fixes are legendary, so thank you. Also thank you for explaining the reasons for the decisions regarding development choices that impacted compatibility. As the project has gone on for a long time it really helps to re-discuss the decisions.

I think the development decisions were made with good intent. I think if we had known how long development would stay in Alpha stage, and how difficult it would be to get good apps running on Haiku. we may have chosen a slightly different path.

I still believe Haiku would have benefited from more pro-active interaction with app developers and app testers. I still think that Haiku development as a whole should be more oriented towards applications. More applications, better applications will bring more users, and more developers.

25

There is a short guide linked from the home page of the bugtracker: https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/ReportingBugs .

I think there is some extra info on the main website but it's so badly organized I can't find the page right now.

26

Iā€™m not sure what you mean by ā€œmore pro-active discussionsā€. We have several communication channels (this forum, the IRC chat, the mailing lists) where input on important decisions is always welcome. You can read the mailing list history for package management discussions, where there was a LOT of input from many developers and users, and I think we reached a reasonable compromise.

We also have dedicated haiku-3rdparty mailing list and IRC channels, which are remarkably quiet, and mostly populated by haiku developers ready to answer questions. Where are the promised app developers after all the efforts setting this up?

Haiku is generally a lot more friendly to developers than many other projects. Getting commit access and becoming a member of the project is very easy (if you think you should after years of submitting patches, we probably forgot about you - please ask!).

27

@PulkoMandy

I cannot find many information about Haiku Depot (not on haiku-os.org), how can I upload packages? how to create (correctly) packagesā€¦

There is generally a great lack on information, especially for Newbies

28

ok https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/PackageManagement/BuildingPackages
but still donā€™t know how to upload!

I like Haiku Depot, it is an important thing to have a good native Package Manager.

Nevertheless I miss Haikuware, it was also a good plattform to contribute to the hole Haiku project.
I am not a good dev, but to port some SDL games is not so hard (I did it years ago for BeOS/Zeta), and I thought to do it again, but noticed haikuware is offlineā€¦

29

Building packages with haikuporter:

  • https://www.haiku-os.org/articles/gentle_introduction_haikuporter_1
  • https://www.haiku-os.org/articles/gentle_introduction_haikuporter_2
This is the recommended way as it ensures your steps are easy to reproduce (and automate). Currently the process of adding packages to haikudepot is manual, and only accessible to developers with commit access. It is too much work and wasting a lot of time for the developers, so this will change (before beta1 is released). If you get an haikuporter recipe written, it should be easy to find one developer to upload your package. Or you can submit it to one of the alternate repositories (http://haiku.uwolke.ru for example) or setup your own. Haiku developers would appreciate a lot to have a separate repository for all the software so we don't have to handle all the packaging and package uploading ourselves. Haikuware did not want to fill in that role, unfortunately.
30

thanks

31

[quote=Caylon]
There is generally a great lack on information, especially for Newbies[/quote]

Maybe because the questions (and answers) get buried in unrelated threads like this. :slight_smile:
Anyway, thereā€™s a recently revised page on Getting Involved | Developing that may be a good start.

Regards,
Humdinger

32

LOL - Herr Humdinger is exactly correct :slight_smile:

http://bb.haikuports.org/haikuports/wiki/HaikuPorterForPM

33

For instance in many environments where new content or apps are desired, someone is appointed the role of app evangelist. That person has the responsibility to recruit new developers, make sure the new app development process is well documented and streamlined. In addition, the evangelist will seek out existing apps and convince developers to port them. This was how Microsoft achieved success with earlier versions of Windows.

34

We are already doing a lot more than that. Porting apps ourselves and sending patches to the original developers. This week I worked with cdrecord developers to fix several issues in Haiku and cdrecord and get them to play together again. Then I worked on patches for Basilisk II and submitted them to their github page.

We get different results in different projects with this, ranging from big interest for the OS to plain and simple rejecting the patches. And various levels of indifference in the middle. But, I doubt it is up to the OS developers to do this. Don't they have more than enough work to do already? And why would they do better at this than other Haiku enthusiasts? They will be there, of course, to answer any technical questions. But the outreach shouldn't be in their hands, it is a task other people can take care of.

Usually, this would mean people would stay outside the "project". But we have made exceptions to this rule: some people got commit access and project membership without writing patches. While they won't use much of the commit access, they do get a vote in important decisions made by the project. I see no problem in doing that for evangelists, if they do a good work. But I don't know if there is a strong need for that, either.

35

I am brand to new Haiku OS having installed it on a laptop in the last few weeks and having bought a cheap capatible wifi card from eBay. I like the system alot. Not knowing much about the history of Haiku, and never having used BeOS since it was a bit before my time, my opinion is, personally, as an outsider, Iā€™d be weary of an OS that didnā€™t have package management and think it was a good decision to attract new people.
Iā€™m enjoying it enough to have donated a small sum. Great work!

36

but it looks like that some people are not happy, how things are going on

37

I donā€™t recommend following the link to that blog, but if you do, look at the other posts of ā€œPhuk Qewā€ to appreciate his mindset.
Thereā€™s been a thread at this forum and an even longer one on the mailing list about that a few weeks ago. Please, let us not derail this thread any more by rehashing whatā€™s already been said ad nauseum elsewhere.

Regards,
Humdinger

38

Time to dust off BeShare and start sharing all those downloaded files.

As BeShare in haikudepot is broken at the moment, I have shared a version packaged by AGMS:

http://fatelk.com/beshare-2.28-1-x86_gcc2.hpkg

This one is not broken and works well.

39

Haikuware is back up againā€¦sort of.

40

It shoud be obviously apparent that we are not going to get Haikuware or BeBits back, and why. We have lost a valuable resource.