I am going to start getting back up to speed on WebKit and WebPositive and related things, though this week is quite hectic as my son’s birthday is soon and we are getting ready for that, plus work, etc. But I at least have the motivation. But man, what a codebase…
Regarding stellarpower and a contract, I know people want GPU acceleration and better video card support in general, but I think there are many other lower hanging fruit which could really improve Haiku without being some intense years long project. I think those are the things we should focus on for now, both for volunteer developers and contractors. Though since contractors are being paid, they can work on some of the things volunteers might not want to. It doesn’t mean these are terrible, drudgery tasks, just maybe more annoying or detail tasks, which maybe would be good for stellarpower based on your mini biography above.
But like I said in my first post here, please try to pick a bug or two to tackle, get a Haiku development system going, and get some patches accepted in Gerrit. Also maybe start browsing tickets in Trac and build up a list of some of the bugs that interest you, or bugs where your past experience might help in solving. Don’t worry too much who owns the bugs, you can always post a comment and change ownership if you start working on something. Though I do know a whole lot are under “nobody”, which means what it sounds like. I think it is safe to say there are bugs and features to work on in just about every possible area of computing. Haiku is a great environment to work on a wide variety of programming tasks!
To be honest my main concern right now for having a single contractor is getting changes reviewed in Gerrit quickly, especially as that contractor gets up to speed. Eventually they will know their way around and can also help review work from volunteers, but I have some concern about patches sitting around too long. The contractor, whether stellarpower, or someone else, may need to structure their work so that changes in Gerrit can sit a week or so until volunteers have some time on the weekends. This may be okay, given the relatively slow pace of Haiku and currently no concern over urgent “production” bugs. But it should be taken into account and a contractor should not be upset if changes take some time to get reviewed. Just wanted to lay that out 