So I have been lurking about the forums, blogs and the site for the past week or so. Additionally, during this time I have been playing around with haiku in virtualbox and a few times from a usb drive on real hardware. From this, I have developed some initial impressions of the mechanics of the project and the community. So in a sense you can take this post as a bit of feedback about how things appear to an outsider.
A couple of weeks ago I decided that I needed to get a new hobby and I was thinking that if I was to get a new hobby why not make it something that would develop personal skills. So I had decided that I wanted to start working on an alternative OS project. I was considering either ReactOS or Haiku to this end. Before looking too much into either project, I found I was innately more interested in the ReactOS project because I could really see the impact that its creation would have, this is because I am familiar with windows. However, once I actually got around to looking into what had been produced by each project, on what timetable this was accomplished, and community involvement, I found Haiku to be strongly favorable. At that point in time I started working on getting acquainted with the project, tried to figure out what makes it special and also how I could help in this.
It seems to me that there is much documentation available to people who wish to start working on Haiku. Also, potential bugs and features to be worked on can easily be found on the bugtracker. The problem that I am having is that there are a number of difficulties which I believe significantly raise the barrier of entry for involvement with this project. I have started with the R1/alpha1 release of Haiku and played around with it for a while. I have wanted to update it to the newest version because I imagine that there are improvements and potentially some changes in how things function from the R1/alpha1 version. However, how this is done is from what I can tell never explicitly mentioned. The best explanation of the process that I could find was from an osnews article here (http://www.osnews.com/story/22903/Writing_Applications_for_Haiku). I am not saying that this article is not well written, what I am saying is that information of this nature should be something easily procured from the haiku project website.
While I understand that nightly builds are not tested and may not work correctly, it does make create a complication for new users, because they end up working with a version of haiku around six months old. I have tried for around a week to get a more up to date installation of haiku running and have failed so far. Does this mean that I am not trying hard enough or that I am not doing enough digging around or just not looking in the right places? Perhaps this is the case and it is my fault, however I think that at least for a small percentage of users, their experience may be the same as mine.
The end result from this experience is that I end up feeling discouraged. I am wondering how I can help when I can’t even manage to do something so trivial. Keep in mind that, I did not come onto the forums just to moan and complain. I am here on these forums making this post because I am still interested in working on this project and I am trying to figure out how to make that happen. I am thinking that right now the greatest contribution that I can make is to tell you exactly what my experience is and what parts of getting acclimated I find most difficult. I imagine that this barrier to entry that I am experiencing is the same that all people experience when trying to get involved.
I think that an important factor in increasing the flow new developers involved in the project is by finding ways to lower this barrier of entry. I also believe that criticism without suggesting improvements is nearly useless and a bit insulting, so in this particular case I do have an idea. Perhaps in regards to nightly builds, there can be a tag denoting particular builds as metastable meaning, updating a Haiku install to this build will not leave it in an unbootable state. I am not saying that too much time should be put into finding which of the most recent builds fits this metastable category, because too much overhead for developers will also reduce production time. My proposition is that perhaps every couple of weeks or every month, someone could go through builds in reverse chronological order to find one which results in a mostly working system. I would not complain about using having to use a nightly build that was a month old, because that would still make it six months newer than R1/alpha1. If you wanted to go the extra mile, a link somewhere on haiku-files which points to the latest build marked metastable, would be amazing.
Those are some of my ideas at the moment. I apologize for being so very verbose, that is just my nature. Also, I do hope that nobody takes offense to any comments I have made here. Thanks.