My.haiku-os.org

I had an idea yesterday - could we take the work done on the Package Management, @lelldorin’s excellent work on BeSlySAT, and signon for the forums/dev tracker, and combine them into a “My Haiku OS” site and client application?

This way, when people install Haiku, the local settings could be synchronised with the My Haiku OS site, and the developers could also collect information (totally opt in, of course, we don’t want to be like MS, Apple, and Google here), amongst other things.

The My Haiku OS site could also act as a OAuth signin provider for the forum and Dev tracker, so maybe one day automated bug reports can be uploaded from the client and Dev tickets created off the back of them? We could then gauge the number of crashes and reasons why?

Any thoughts?

The Haiku project has not enough people to even keep their servers running. Don’t expect them to deploy new services anytime soon.

In general, don’t rely on the Haiku project to handle everything. Set up something, and if it works well, they may adopt it.

Does BeSlySAT even perform that “settings backup” service? I thought it was just collecting informations about the hardware?

The idea of automated bug reports has been raised quite a few time, and I’m still not convinced it is the right way to handle this. A good bug report is one with precise steps to reproduce, useful crash logs, etc. This requires interaction between the user reporting the bug, and the devs trying to fix it. I think with an automated solution, people will just click the “report a bug” button and never worry about it again. Did you ever check what Microsoft does when you send a bug report from their similar window?

We are lucky to have several users actively testing and reporting bugs already. We trained them to make good bug reports. And they got so good at it that the developer team has enough work for the next few years already. This raises the question of who would handle a massive amount of bugreports, of which many would likely be duplicates of existing ones. We would need a group of people willing to triage the reports, investigate reproductibility, etc. Otherwise, the data will not be exploitable.

(also, please do use categories when posting messages to the forum - I edited your post so it is in the right place)

Thanks for reading through my ideas.

FIrstly, let me make one thing clear - I did not mean to imply this was something that the Haiku team would produce! I was just gauging interest in the idea and whether people would find it useful - in which case I’d consider trying it as my first Haiku app.

Regarding your comments:-

BeSlySAT doesn’t support settings backup - that was something I would add to this “My Haiku” client daemon.

As a note, I do know what MS does with bug reports - they go to the Windows Dev Center where authorised software developers can log in (with a digital certificate) and view aggregated data or drill down to single reports. I myself have a system where bug reports are uploaded from my software and enter an Elasticsearch instance to allow various keywords to be extracted using Percolator.

Regarding these bug reports, my thoughts were more directed towards application developers, not necessarily just the OS developers (though system crashes would be an OS thing).

I suppose I was considering this more from a perspective of the OS going out to “casual” users; the same people who might not take the time to create a dev.haiku-os.org account and upload the various bug reports…

Anyway, just my $0.02. Thanks for your comments!

i confirm with pulkomandy, because a automatically bug report system add many unsorted and not beep enough reports into the bug tracker.

i like the Bug tracker. i need some time to get warm with him but now it is ok. would be fine to get any time a more Userfriendly gui to it.

beslySAT is only a storing app of system informations. informations about the system and how does it do his work for the user. the plan to make a online database with the collected data are on ice, because not enough People out there who have fun to run the app and send there data.
beslySAT is a good base for sending system informations with a bug report, so there is a export function included.

please never forget that the base of haiku developers are very smal. all that devs do his work on his free and private time. haiku is a hobby and a just for fun system.
haiku does not have some companies in the background who support the System. they are no commercial app developers on haiku too. all freeware and ported Software. only a hand of apps are developed for haiku directly (like wonderbrudh and beam). a automatically system for bug reports for supporting centers is a good idea but on the current state of haiku not realistic.

@lelldorin - where is the source for your tool, please? Is it on Git?

OAuth signin provider is an idea I was thinking about lately. It would be great if Haiku provided this.
I want to create a translation system like Pootle, but for 3rd-party apps, but I don’t want to make the users create yet another account. I can make integration with GitHub, but not every user has that, so “Haiku account” would be the best bet here.

dwt: where is the source for your tool, please? Is it on Git?

I dont know if it make sense to place it there but i want people can see that the app does not collect secret data.

Bug tracking in a software this small probably wouldn’t be the best idea, but I wonder if a hardware form or similar could be put into Devices or something?