If people are realistic, we know that Haiku R1 is not about “shinies” (endless new features and capabilties). It’s about having BeOS R5 in modern form. But, we have to be realistic and realize you CANNOT have EVERYTHING you want, if you want ANYTHING… in a timely fashion. And 20 years to get a “clone” of BeOS R5… seriously? TWO FREAKING DECADES?!?
Maybe a lack of finances was partly to blame. Maybe a lack of manpower or the right people to work on the necessary components. I mean, if an open-source project with a low level of finances takes 20 years to reach beta… then I guess it couldn’t be helped, but I sure didn’t think we were THAT unmotivated over the years.
You can expect whatever you want. If there’s not enough people doing the actual work to fulfill the roadmap it’s not going to happen. This is exactly why we don’t have a time based roadmap. Only tickets that are defined as blockers for R1. This has been explained by the developers in several threads on this forum and I wonder how many times it needs to be repeated.
EDIT: It’s even explained by several devs in this very thread
Whatever you say would be valid if the project solely went on with volunteers. Now there is a person on the payroll, paid to do exactly this kind of stuff.
Edit: There was a deleted sentence here, which I am not sure if qualified as an insult, but still removed it as per the mod team’s suggestion just to be on the same page and not give birth to misunderstandings. Didn’t expect this to blow up this much though. Sorry everyone!
One paid developer is most likely not enough to guarantee an exact timeframe for an R1 release. And I think it’s good that the project is quite upfront with this, instead of making promises that can’t be kept. Everybody that’s thinking about donating can decide if they are OK with this or not.
Besides, I don’t think we would benefit from an exact schedule that much. Think about several releases of commercial software (OS and applications) that were not really ready and were rushed out on the market because of release schedules.
BeOS had its time as a commercial OS and it failed. I think we should be happy that Haiku exists as an open source non-commercial project that moves forward maybe a bit slowly, but also can’t die instantly like commercial endeavours.
What do you find unrealistic about the current list of bugs? The fact that it keeps gettting bigger over time instead of reducing?
One part-time developer, even paid, is not going to make that much of a difference here. Or, well, it does make a large difference, but the TODO list is even larger.
I think, on the contrary, that the current plan is realistic, in the sense that it matches with who is working on the project and what we can commit to it. It is disappointing that this means R1 is several years in the future, but it is realistic. We could instead make a more ambitious plan and then fail at it because we don’t have the workforce to do it.
Indeed. Anyone can look at the activity & contract reports I’ve written over the last two years, and my commit logs to match them to see that this is the case.
Not really the same track; Zircon is based on LittleKernel, Travis Geiselbrecht’s refinement of the ideas he championed in the NewOS kernel… while the Haiku kernel is essentially a fork of the last version of the NewOS kernel, co-written by Geiselbrecht et al.
In essence, LK/Zircon had much more time under Geiselbrecht’s control and my basic thinking here is that because he hit a winning formula with NewOS, it makes sense to take the ultimate expression of this winning formula, rather than some earlier stage.
Though what I’m very carefully not saying, now that all this work has been done to leave the Haiku contributors’ stamp on the NewOS kernel, is that this must now be ripped out wholesale. What I am saying is that if Haiku must change its kernel, it must be necessarily Zircon or no change at all. Now, I still think there are advantages to going over to a more recent kernel built by the same man on the same ideas, but this is not something I proclaim with conviction.
The word you’re looking for is Catch-22. “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.”
I’m not paid to work on Haiku, but Waddlesplash is (and he’s not in France).
Also I think your tone is very inappropriate, there is no need to be so aggressive here. Especially for a discussion that was already closed almost a year ago, what’s the point?
Not really. These kernels were developped with different goals in mind. LK is a microkernel, NewOS isn’t. The reason Haiku picked NewOS is because it was the closest thing to the BeOS kernel available at the time. LK is improved for other uses, but by doing so, it drifts away from BeOS, and is less useful to Haiku.
