Senryu says So Long

Software
1

Nobody seems to have noticed, but Karl has apparently given up on Senryu. I happened to click on BeBits the other day (wanted a random URL for testing), and saw this:

Update, Oct. 26, 2015

Dear friends & visitors,

Re: Senryu OS:

I have decided not continue this endeavour, partly for personal reasons, and partly because I just don’t see any relevance to modern computing anymore. I haven’t visited Haiku’s website in months, and unfortunately, it felt good. I don’t have the spark, drive, or enthusiasm I used to have about Haiku or this project.
[…]

See the rest at BeBits or HaikuWare.

2

I noticed this too yesterday, as I visited the pages from time to time myself to see when they would get ‘unstuck’. But your post is inaccurate. The project is not dead, but rather is “open” to whoever wants it. Here is a direct quote from said statement on BeBits or Haikuware:

[quote]
What I did, was opened up the spreadsheet to those who expressed interest in becoming a Senryu OS director. I am leaving it in the hands of these individuals to decide the possible future of the project. The spreadsheet is open for commenting, so this way, they could organize any advancement of the project.[/quote]

And he goes on further to write:

So Senryu is not dead. The author just decided he will not head the project, but will still support it, and is simply leaving it to the community his site form tried to start.

And I have no idea what this huge change will do, or who will decide to continue Senryu. It’s a big question. I honestly just don’t know, and in many ways, it makes me wonder myself what I’m going to do about Poem or whether to just quit it, because if his estimate of $ 6.75 k was raised for Senryu, then that means it would have had a good user base. As far as Senryu goes, anyone could continue that project and make it all work. I guess history will just have to be the guide on all this.

I have no doubt that Haiku, Inc. and the Haiku will continue like it always has and will eventually reach R1 and beyond. Sure, some people (whether general users or developers whose old software was broken) will be disgruntled at the PM change, but once HaikuDepot is totally ready, that will subside and everyone will adapt to the new change. At first, I hated PM being introduced, but I begin to see it all now. Change is change, and I have confidence people will acclimate to building software around that design.

On a final note, though, if BeBits and Haikuware came back online, that would definitely be good! :slight_smile: Again, it’s just a matter of letting history run its course…

3

Making the hosted software collection and descriptions available through archive.org would’ve been a nice gesture. But I guess that’ll be entombed with Senryu for entertainment in the afterlife…

Regards,
Humdinger

4

I don’t quite see how it was ‘inaccurate’…(:-/) I didn’t say it was dead, just that Karl has given up on pursuing it – which he has. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone does take it further.

[quote]
On a final note, though, if BeBits and Haikuware came back online, that would definitely be good! :slight_smile: [/quote]
I would love it if we could recover all that data! I wonder if Karl still has the database, or if he just trashed it? The latter would be a tragedy. (For curiosity, I checked the Wayback Machine, and it seems he specifically disallowed their archiving (:frowning: )

5

Since the Website is now “completly” down, it would be good to look into, what brings us the user / donors back to haiku. As Karl claimed he had found many people who are willing to donate a (not to small) ammount of money regulary and also people who are interesseted in continuing the development of senry os.
As it looks someone who spearheads this project is missing.
So the question is how to get these people back to haiku os, how we could.
What would make sense to “offer” them so that they understand that we take there concerns seriously?

6

Karl will marry! and will go back to Germany

Thanks for all, Karl

7

[quote=Paradoxon]Since the Website is now “completly” down, it would be good to look into, what brings us the user / donors back to haiku. As Karl claimed he had found many people who are willing to donate a (not to small) ammount of money regulary and also people who are interesseted in continuing the development of senry os.
As it looks someone who spearheads this project is missing.
So the question is how to get these people back to haiku os, how we could.
What would make sense to “offer” them so that they understand that we take there concerns seriously?[/quote]

Someone who has the access to donations data needs to update the Indicator more often and resume publishing Donation Analysis reports again (still no report for 2015). New contract proposals need to be announce by Haiku Inc. like implementation of UEFI/USB 3.0 (remember Haiku Code Drive https://www.haiku-os.org/community/hcd?). Some type of the report needs to be written and available on the main page which would tell end users regarding the current state of Haiku and the impediments which prohibit the release of Beta version right now (PulkoMandy? :)). I know that this one has been discussed several times in mailing lists but not everyone reads them.

8

For contract, our problem is finding developers willing to work for us at the low rates we can offer. And, Haiku, inc is a bit picky on who is accepted, because they don’t want to waste money on code that may not be merged to Haiku.

We have been trying to setup something similar to the HCD but the student decided to do GSoC with FreeBSD, so the USB3 support will have to wait a little more.

As for the roadmap to beta1, there is a single major blocking problem: we need a proper way to build package repositories from HaikuPorts recipes. This is a bit out of control for the development team, in the hand of the system administration team. And our resources in sysadmin are very scarce, because 1) not that much people are interested in contributing there and 2) we don't want to give access and control to our servers to random people who want to join, we need to build some trust there.

Still, people are working on it. I'm trying to do a bit of "public relations" with the weekly update. Lately there has been so much critics from users on the forums and mailing lists, and flamewars especially on the mailing lists, this has demotivated some of our devs, and most of the remaining ones withdrawed from the public communication channels. It takes a thick skin to accept the criticism from people who don't contribute much to the development, even if the critics are justified.

Thanks to everyone who tries to be constructive and help fixing and properly reporting the bugs, and keep the forums and mailing lists alive despite of this.

9

[quote=michaelvoliveira]Karl will marry! and will go back to Germany

Thanks for all, Karl[/quote]

Wow cool… i devinitly need to meet him… where is he going? can you give me a pm?
I really would love if there could be a talk out with everyone… because he was a
unbelivable supporter for Haiku its a tragedy that we “lost” him.
I think we all have the same goal… a wonderfull and easy to use and maintain os ;).

10

karlvd at gmail.com. Please tell him I said hi.

11

Someone should just implement a decentralized file store… there could be an optional service at startup that mirrors packages files over all Haiku boxes running the service.

And of course there would need to be security on this file sharing system to enable team members to upload to the “official” area as well as administrate the unofficial areas… I’m just saying that I think the package hosting solution should be “part of Haiku” and not just something hosted on Linux etc… Perhaps even make it so that A) the site you download the first repo from is administrator of the repos or B) you manually administrate the packages (and thus become administrator for anyone that used your box as the main host.

12

[quote=cb88]Someone should just implement a decentralized file store… there could be an optional service at startup that mirrors packages files over all Haiku boxes running the service.
[/quote]
We of course already have BeShare as a decentralized file store… (:-))
There are already a considerable number of hpkgs available there. I’m glad to see that the majority of them have Info attributes attached, so it’s fairly easy to scan for stuff you might want. It’s not quite a ‘Depot’ – you have to drag a package manually to the ‘packages’ folder, rather than just clicking “Install”, but that’s balanced by being able to share other things than packages, too.

I’m wondering if it would be worthwhile to add some “Depot” facilities to BeShare. An “Install” button or two (two, so that you could also install in ~/config – one up on HaikuDepot (:-)0 and maybe a mode that restricts queries to hpkgs.

13

Yes, there are a lot of hpkgs on BeShare, but that is mainly because AGMS is a real packrat :wink: if he dropped out, how much would be left? Also, there’s stuff being shared there which is questionable in terms of licensing. Not much, but enough that Haiku, Inc can’t risk having their name attached to it.

Also, once you have downloaded an hpkg from BeShare, you can just doubleclick it to install to /config. Or you can set up a Filer rule. How about a custom version of Filer that does just one thing: scan the BeShare d/l folder for new hpkgs and if they are more recent than the installed one, move them to /config/packages? Bundle it with Beshare and you’re all set.

14

Yes, there are a lot of hpkgs on BeShare, but that is mainly because AGMS is a real packrat :wink: if he dropped out, how much would be left?[/quote]
Yep – he’s a mainstay! I was hoping that others would come forward and do the same, but I guess not many have the facilities. (I certainly don’t)

I do like the freedom of BeShare, but that is a downside.

Heh. Something like that would be neat. Would there be any real need for a custom Filer, though? Just a rule and probably a script to do the more specialized checking.
Has Humdinger published his revised Filer yet? Haven’t noticed it.

15

I would love it if we could recover all that data! I wonder if Karl still has the database, or if he just trashed it? The latter would be a tragedy. (For curiosity, I checked the Wayback Machine, and it seems he specifically disallowed their archiving (:frowning: )

Hi, although I have lurked on the forum for a while I have just joined, specifically so I could answer your post.
I was looking through some old hard drives yesterday that I haven’t used for years, mainly to see what was on them. I have a mirror of the BeBits website on one of these drives, it dates back to 2009 so that is when I must have downloaded the site.
I’m not sure if it’s complete, it’s only 1.5 Gb in size so most of the actual software files will be missing. However, the site opens the pages to the point of software descriptions and download links so it is almost complete. With the recent torrent of BeOS software that is available it would be rebuildable to a usable state I think.
I have made backups of the site and will keep it available for anyone interested in rebuilding it or archiving it for historical purposes. :thumbsup:

16

Yes, I, too have an archive of BeBits circa 2010; however, the crawler went through all external links so there’s a good bit of software with it, too. I haven’t found the time to upload it somewhere yet, but I probably will in the near future…

17

Cool, mine only gathered internal links so there is some software, but not as much as yours.
It would be a real shame for the site and associated info to just disappear, between what you have and I have it would be possible to recreate it by the sounds of it. It would be good if someone was willing to take it over, although it would be a lot of work going through the site and removing any reference to BeBits. Then again, is there enough BeOS users left for it to be worthwhile?

18

That would be great… I still use BeOS frequently as well as Haiku. Do the links also show the feedback comments? They were just as valuable as the software in some cases, such as specifics on manually installing drivers, etc.

19

Yes, it opens and displays everything just as it was on the web in 2009. The external software download links are mostly dead, but they were back then anyway. With the torrents of available software and other stuff people have on their web sites, it should be possible to bring it back to a fully functional state. It would be a lot of work changing all the links though.

20

Is it possible to first set it up without updated software links? It would make the very useful software descriptions and feedback comments available with dead links, but that wouldn’t be much different than BeBits was anyway before its demise. The last time I used BeBits, virtually every download link was dead, but the software descriptions and feedback were still there which were a big help if you could download the software from another source. There’s quite a few downloads in the existing archives that don’t include a description or installation info, etc.