I’ve been following Haiku’s progress on an almost daily basis since it first began and it used to be so much easier to get a feel for the progress of each major portion of the OS by taking a quick glance at the status page. On this page, as I’m sure we can all remember, there was clearly-organized, color-coded chart where one could very quickly see how far along each project was. The new view of this same data is not nearly as easy to read and doesn’t really get to the point, so to speak. Someone please consider fixing this.
I didn’t want to detour that thread any further off topic than it already is, so I’m just going to reply to myself in here…
I seriously miss the old status page. It was so easy to read. So simple and elegant. With just a quick glance, you could get a really good feel for where everybody was, progress-wise. (And, of course, if you wanted to get a little more detail on a specific kit, you could click the kit you were interested in to see a little more info on just that kit.)
I loved that page. Can’t believe it got pulled. It was so helpful.
If it’s just been moved and someone knows where it is… please tell me. If it really is gone… please… someone… bring it back.
[quote=uberjuun]I loved that page. Can’t believe it got pulled. It was so helpful.
If it’s just been moved and someone knows where it is… please tell me. If it really is gone… please… someone… bring it back. :)[/quote]
The page looked really nice, but it was very far from being up to date most of the time. A status update page that is not kept up to date is quite meaningless, and that is why it was removed.
Personally, I think that maintaining such a page has proven not to be viable, so I doubt that it is going to come back; but that’s only my personal opinion.
The problem with the status page is that now most of Haiku is functionally complete and mainly bug-testing and fixing remain it is hard for it to accurately reflect the work that’s happening. Other work also doesn’t fit - for example the addition of an I/O scheduler framework does not necessarily make things closer to an alpha (which is more a question of stability and API completeness than anything else), but it is important work that will improve I/O performance in the OS.
The question is how to communicate this progress, and it’s not something we’ve found the answer to yet. I believe the best way is to have someone look over all the changes and compile a summary of the big things, but that actually takes quite a lot of effort to put together (I’m one of about 4 or 5 people who have tried and found it tough going!) I haven’t given up completely btw, and I’m hoping to restart human-readable updates after this week of crazy report writing is over and done with!
Is there anyway you could just make a “Feature List” section that lays out what Haiku can do? It wouldn’t take a great deal of maintenance, you would only update it when a new feature became stable, but it would tell everyone all the things that the OS can do.
A feature list of an entire OS is quite a daunting task. IMO extending and improving the documentation is a more worthwhile endeavour. That way you not only see what it can do, but also how it’s done.
This is true for both user and developer documentation.
