RFC: Quarterly report

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1

Hi. I’ve made a script I want to record with footage I will also record for a “Qaurterly report” video

Please provice feedback to the script, it is based on the three latest monthly reports distilled down into user facing stuff presentable in a video.

EDIT: If someone wants to write a haikuports section to be included that would be fine too, I don’t know enough what changed there to write much though.

Regards

Hi, I’m nephele, and welcome to the first Haiku quarterly report.

This report will cover the months July, August and Semptember of 2023.
For the purposes of this video I’ll be looking at user visible stuff,
there is a lot of important invisible stuff happening all the time, but not that nice to show.

First, let us talk about the three Google summer of code projects which wrapped up in this period.

First up is zardshard’s project on improving Icon-O-Matic.

The main new additions are reference images,
And perspective transformations.

They even work together!

[ Sped up sequence of using a reference image + perspective to create an icon ]

The next project to cover is Pairisto’s work on vpn support in Haiku.

During the period a TUN/TAP driver was written, this allows the OS to provide the backend for any vpn software in userspace, and can also be used by virtualization software for their virtual network.

OpenVPN has been ported, and now works properly on Haiku
!!! VERIFY THIS??? This gives us a layer 2 and layer 3 virtual network if needed.
!!! VERIFY THIS??? Layer 2 for example allows broadcast packages to be routed, which is required by some games in their LAN mode.

The third project to cover is trungnt2910’s work on a port of the .NET platform

The runtime and SDK of .NET have been ported to Haiku during, and before this GSOC project. trungnt2910 had already started on this port before.

The .NET SDK aswell as other components have been sucessfully ported, and additionally bindings for the Haiku kits have been created.
This will allow developers to write native Haiku applications in C#, if so desired.

That’s all for the Google summer of code, now on to Haiku itself.

Let’s start with drivers!

A driver for Elantech I2C devices was added, these are touchpads for some laptops that don’t work with the normal HID driver.

CUT THIS?: The iaxwifi200 driver, which corresponds to iwx from OpenBSD was updated to a newer version.

And lastly support for newer hardware was added to the PCH thermal driver. (on intel machines)

The UFS2 Filesystem driver has been improved subtantially, Haiku can now read UFS2 partitions! But not write to them yet.

Now on to Applications.
VERIFY THIS: korli commit The Terminal applications now supports underline colors and styles.

[ show Terminal rendering vim spellcheck ]

Clipboard pasting was implemented in SerialConnect

The Mail applications had the title of it’s preferences window fixed.
It now supports Drag and Drop everywhere on the window,
and email drafts now have their own mime type and icon to differentiate them from send or received emails.

The open drafts querry has also been fixed

Tracker has also received some fixes and improvements, the open button was fixed in cases where it was incorrectly enabled.
A bug was also fixed related to the background images when switching directories.

GlTeapot gained the ability to optionally disable the lock to the screen refresh rate.

CodyCam’s Icon was updated.

The PowerStatus applet can now be configured to play a different sound for a critical battery status and a low battery status.

Now onto the preference panes.

The Screen preferences were adjusted to use a matrix menu layout, this makes it more useable with screens that allow a large range of resolutions.
The underlying screen vendor database file has also been fixed to remove some extranous do not use strings or to restore proper vendor names.

Keymap’s Modifier keys dialog has been refactored, additionally the capslock key can now be remapped.

Now for some more miscelanous changes:
everywhere applications used an x for multiplication the proper unicode symbol is now used. This is not that visual a change but allows translators to identify this is ment to convey multiplication and can use a different sign depending on the translation.

The kernel debugger now uses PAUSE for all CPUs the debugger is not running on, this gives quite a substantial power save in the kernel debugger.

This video does not cover much of what has happened in Haikuports, mainly because I do not spend much attention there, and there are no monthly reports for it.

Two things i’d like to highlight though, the release of llvm and clang 17 in haikuports and the release of gcc13. Haiku is now compiled by default with gcc13, there are some problems currently like DWARF5 debugger symbols not completely supported by haiku yet though.

Lastly I’d like to thank all contributers and especially the new contributors for their hard work on Haiku!

That was it for this first quarterly report, what did you think? Feel free to reach out for feedback and critizism and I may do one for the next quarter.

Good day

8 Likes
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I like the idea @nephele :slight_smile:

Just a note, the PCH thermal driver is not included in regular images/package, AFAICT.

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On one hand, @Begasus started to post some Haikuports reports on the forum. So perhaps, you could join efforts on that point. As you say, lot of progress made on Haiku are not visible, it would give more things to show.
On the other hand, some people don’t see the differences between the two projects, keeping progresses of Haiku and those made on Haikuports separated avoids to add more confusion.
Anyway, good luck.

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A lot has changed at haikuports side (should really try to gasp all the changes).
Most important one that also included changes to Haiku is the new gcc13 packages, there is also major changes on new LLVM17 and an endless list on new updated packages there.
In the last period I’ve also been looking into updating packages that are reported as vulnerable at repology. And helping out some new contributors to haikuports, welcome there and kudos on your work!

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gcc13 and llvm17 are mentioned, but those are the only “Big” ones.

If you are interested you can provide me with a condensed list of changes that are user visible, say new versions that allow more stuff, or more importantly new ports. (I’ll then add them to the script on my own)

“we dropper python version X” is not that interesting to cover here : )

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The VPN/TUN-TAP patches are not yet merged, unfortunately they need some rework still and it couldn’t be done in time for the end of GSoC.

Other than that, seems good to me!

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I’d be open to help with editing the video together as well. Also have a short Haiku logo animation from a while back that might be useful here. Can also do the English subtitling too.

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Great idea! I can’t wait to see what you come up with :slight_smile:

Looks correct. From the code…

underline styles:

enum {
	SINGLE_UNDERLINE = 1,
	DOUBLE_UNDERLINE,
	CURLY_UNDERLINE,
	DOTTED_UNDERLINE,
	DASHED_UNDERLINE
};

underline color:


	rgb_color rgb_fore = fTextForeColor;
	rgb_color rgb_back = fTextBackColor;
	rgb_color rgb_under = fTextForeColor;

	// color attribute
	if (attr.IsForeSet())
		rgb_fore = attr.ForegroundColor(fTextBuffer->Palette());
	if (attr.IsBackSet())
		rgb_back = attr.BackgroundColor(fTextBuffer->Palette());
	if (attr.IsUnderSet())
		rgb_under = attr.UnderlineColor(fTextBuffer->Palette());
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Should sit down and do a sumup on haikuports side :slight_smile: On the third quarter there have been 613 commits, quite some fixes, version bumps and some new recipes. :slight_smile:

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It was a note because I did not understand what was ment by underline styles and colors xD

Now to figure out how to make a shell script demo those : )

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Maybe you figured something out already, but here is what I have :slight_smile:

echo -e '\e[4:2m\e[38;5;97m\e[58;5;88mHello World!\e[0m'

It looks like this: Hello World! with formatting

Resources:

https://misc.flogisoft.com/bash/tip_colors_and_formatting

1 Like
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Another thing to mention here is

  • split views now allow vertically resizing the object lists
  • many bugfixes, most important IMO selecting vertices with a selection box, which was broken before.

FWIW, I think that was mainly a subtle visual change, as the Unicode “×” is vertically centered compared to a normal letter “x”. It’s still translatable, if there’s a language using a different symbol, but it wasn’t the intention for the change.

Thanks for working on this. I’m looking forward to the first installment! :slight_smile:

1 Like
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German mainly uses “⋅” instead of “×” in my experience. Maybe an option for this would be better than deciding on this per localization (since both are valid)

For editing I will use kdenlive. I want to use medo but undortunately it does not yet do everything I need.

I will take a look at the animation, although i prefer low motion “queit” styles of videos, wel’ll see.

I’d definetely accept the help for subtitling though!

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That is definitely the kind of thing that will uselessly clutter the options for no good reason. The German localization miling list can have a discussion about it and decide which symbol to use, hopefully?

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Having an “x” or now “×” for dimensions is very common. In Haiku it’s mainly used for icon sizes and screen resolutions etc. I don’t think further changes are needed here.

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“stuff” is not a good choice of wording. I would suggest using the word “work”.

I would also not call it invisible since it is not. I would also rephrase “nice”.

“For the purposes of this video I’ll be looking at work that is of interest to the average user of Haiku. There are a lot of important work happening all the time within the project and I will be trying to present some of it in a way that is easy to understand.”

1 Like
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This implies that the average user only cares about visible stuff, which seems wrong to me, and the last part of your version comes around as condescending.

The work I called invisible really is: You cannot see it, there are no UI changes because of them.

1 Like
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There are → there is a lot of work…

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I think it can simply be “In this video I will focus on the more user-facing changes that fit well with the format, there are also many changes behind the scenes that are not so easy to demonstrate here”, since the problem is not wether they are user-facing, but wether they can be shown in video form in an interesting way (some of them could be, but it would need some work to convert articles into a script for a tech video about a speficic topic…)

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Very wonderful report for non technical user of Haiku!
Very, very good report for user like me who have not that much time to figure out what’s going on in Haiku development.

Like it very much, thanks!

Even not a video I still like to see what a custom user might recognize for enhancement happen.