Not if a newbe installed this first 
I use the nightly on bar metal too. Over years on diffferent hardware
Okay, you got me. I use the actual beta till now. But today I’ll change to the recent nightly.
One question: Is it possible to update a beta to nightly or should I better make a clean new install?
Btw, I use our home nextcloud, so all data is save.
Yes, updating to nightly is possible, changing repositories may be needed:
pkgman add https://eu.hpkg.haiku-os.org/haiku/master/$(getarch)/current
pkgman add https://eu.hpkg.haiku-os.org/haikuports/master/$(getarch)/current
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I use the nightly 32bit and 64bit.
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I always use nightlies, and update very frequently. I have hardly ever had a problem.
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Thanks. The update is done. Now I’m running Haiku nightly. As all other users write here, I have no doubt that it will work fine.
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If you ask the users here on the forums or on the IRC channel, yes, sure. We are used to Haiku being a work in progress and things not always working as expected. Some of us are developers and we fix problems ourselves. Some other know the way to the bugtracker and who to ask when there are problems.
Why not just make real beta releases? It’s not that hard. Someone has to write the changelog and put a tag on it, basically. That’s all there is to a release.
However, we are trying to have no regressions from one version to another. Currently there is one regression, which is subtle but annoying. The text box when renaming files in Tracker doesn’t work properly. Ok, maybe it is obsessing in what is essentially a small and not so important detail.
The other thing is we need to update some packages in the haiku repository that will allow updating WebKit to a newer version (something that we could not do for a way too long time). Unfortunately this process is undocumented with only two people who know how to do it (and I’m not one of them). So there has been no progress on this for at least the last 3 months.
And so the release date is pushed back…
I had attempted to schedule it for march (a release every 9 month instead of every year). The idea was to speed things up a bit, continue to improve and automate the release process, hoping that we can do it more and more often. Maybe every 6 months, maybe every 3 months, I don’t know where it will feel reasonable to stop this. But clearly 1 year is too long.
The third issue marked as blocker in the beta3 roadmap is improvements to DriveSetup. This is because we had a lot of feedback from people failing to install beta 2 at all. These are the kind of users I have in mind when I say pushing people to use the nightlies is a bad idea. People who will grow frustrated when someday their system stop updating, or one day it boots to a black screen because someone has updated a graphics driver. Or they just can’t figure out the exact dance of button clicking to perform in DriveSetup to do a correct Haiku install. Sure, if you look at mmu_man doing it live in a FOSDEM talk, it seems very easy. But that is someone with years of training doing it. When you don’t know about it, you get one of these painful youtube review videos where the operator spends 15 to 30 minutes just trying to get Haiku booted.
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Nightlies? Not me. I can learn enough from a beta. Just when I think I’ve got used to it, another beta comes out.
Thanks for explaining the thinking. However, I am not sure that each release has to include some major new improvement. A quarterly release would be quite OK even if it contained nothing but bug-fixes.
And a quarterly release would make the point that the OS is under active development - something that an annual Beta doesn’t do.
I’d go for a fixed schedule of quarterly releases, each containing the latest proven code. People are using nightlies because they have no idea when the next release is going to be, and they want to get the benefit of the work that has been going on. With a quarterly release they wouldn’t have long to wait.
If it helps, I believe the problem started right after hrev54509 #16492 (Renaming files not working and cursor issues in hrev54513) – Haiku
Only nightly, only real hardware, only hardcore!
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I’m still working on Tracker Edit Name but haven’t fixed it yet. If we get to beta and it’s still not fixed yet I’ll have to revert BTextView to get it working again.
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Only nightly builds on real hardware.
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Me too, nightly builds (x86-64) on real hardware.
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They don’t, the main rule should be that there are no known regressions from the previous version. We don’t want new releases to make things worse.
With the current development model (where everything gets merged to main branch without a lot of testing, our unit tests are never run and largely out of date, etc), this is difficult to achieve. We got into this situation because Haiku was not initially designed to have this many releases, and there is a culture from the developers to keep things that way (it’s simpler for them).
Maybe one thing that could help is having a dedicated “release team”, but I think that would gain acceptance only if it starts from the existing system and then starts improving from it. A “let’s pick and tag some nightly that looks good” system would not get my vote for a variety of reasons, including:
- Currently our beta releases are built with less debugging enabled, which means they are faster than nightlies
- Beta release get some more testing, and in some cases we disable or revert experimental code that doesn’t work
- It’s also a kind of training for us to know how to do a release. It would be a problem if we didn’t try to provide good support for betas, and then jumped straight into final R1 without any preparation
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You make a good case for not using nightlies, except that you haven’t addressed the reason why people DO use nightlies - that they are much more up-to-date than the most recent Beta release.
It’s clear from recent postings that a lot of non-Devs ARE using nightlies, and you have earlier said that they aren’t too time-consuming to produce.
So what do you think? Would it be unfair, or would it be counter-productive, to ask for quarterly or even four-monthly releases?
Is there any way in which non-devs could help?
Because I think more frequent releases would be useful in a number of ways. It’ll look good; it’ll lead to a better experiences for newbies; it might help to encourage/focus the development team; and you could even hide the nightlies completely except from the developer team.
Everyone agrees that more releases would be better. It’s up to the devs to do the work on continuint to automate the process, be better at setting deadlines, etc.
And, no, nightlies shouldn’t be hidden. They are very useful for testing and I appreciate that the users who know their way around here (being active in the forums, bugtracker, etc) will probably want to use these, either because some bugs are fixed, or, more importantly, because it helps finding bugs before they are releases in a beta. If there were no nightlies, this testing would not happen, and our betas would be more full of bugs.
That’s how I view it, there is one tier of users who are involved in the community here, and for these it is fine to use nighlies. But then there are a lot more people that just try Haiku occasionally or more frequently without ever reaching to the community. They just want to be users of an operating system. I suspect there will be more and more of them as Haiku gets more known and more mature. And for these people, using nightlies is a bad idea, it would just create a bad experience for them, maybe not permanently, but whenever there is some occasional breakage. And that would be enough to cause frustration.
That’s all I’m saying: for these users not involved here in the forum or the bugtracker, we have beta versions they can run relatively safely. This is what the webpage download points to and that’s intentional. For you all here, you know your way around Haiku, and you help finding the bugs early before they get to the beta releases, by using the nightlies.
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We had this discussion about the beta before. the nightly versions are for developers and testers. the official beta released is for users. this should run in parallel from the repo server addresses. the beta only gets bug fixes and updates. the nightlys are constantly being recreated in order to check the new development statuses and to correct errors. only when everything is going well and stable in the nightlys can a new official release be made out of it.
Never change a running system. This is a good way.
Make the official Release first viewable and hold the link to the nightlys smal with needed warning of using.
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Good day,
I only use the nightlies too. Mostly to test out hardware and software. They seem to behave fairly OK for now. Truth to be told, I’m lagging in the Game dev tasks, mostly due to Godot not being so stable yet, and the Audio thing. Though for more “regular users” the Betas should be the way to go, imho.
Regards,
RR