The Gerrit code review iceberg, episode 3 | Haiku Project

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Recently some discussions on the forum led to asking about the status of our Gerrit code review. There are a lot of changes there that have been inactive for several years, with no apparent interest from anyone. To be precise, there are currently 346 commits waiting for review (note that Gerrit, unlike Github and other popular code review tools, works on a commit-by-commit basis, so each commit from a multiple-commit change is counted separately). The oldest one has not seen any comments since 2018.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/pulkomandy/2025-12-19-the_gerrit_pending_review_iceberg_3
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Moreover, there is a project called Ham that is meant to replace Jam (a new tool compatible with the existing build files). This reduces the interest in digging into Jam’s code, with which several of the Haiku devs are not too familiar.

I can’t see that Haiku will be buildable with Ham in foreseeable future. So I think it is more practical to improve original Jam instead.

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I agree. With some regret, when I tried to continue or fork Ham I was told by some of the main Haiku developers (I forget who exactly) that it was basically a failed experiment.

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There’s one heading missing: Change 330 - DriveSetup: add “Disk image menu”

Does markup stumble over the used quotes?

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Why is this change stalled?

This change just needs a little bit of code cleanup, that the original author never got around to doing.

I was the author of Change 60. I guess the reason it got stalled is that I didn’t know if the reviewers wanted to proceed with the patch because of the question @PulkoMandy raised in https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/60/1#message-a172a94e42a19976f4cf5823f254029af02ff9a7.

If you are looking for an easy way to start contributing to Haiku, changes like this may be the perfect place.

I totally agree and wouldn’t mind if anyone else wanted to work on it.

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Contributions to improve jam are still welcome. But at least some people are not interested in doing it. The goal of the article is to look into why no one worked on things, and certainly not discourage people from working on it anyways.

There was a GSoC project that made some significant progress, but also produced a document considering what a re-rewrite of ham could look like. You can very well ignore that part and continue to work on the first version. The experiment is not failed as long as it is not complete?

It was just a question. Maybe I should not have put it in review comments. In fact we could have both the command line way (as done in the patch) and later also add the translator based way as separate work. So if anyone is working on this change, feel free to ignore that part

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Than another GSoC with another Jam rewrite that yet again will be not complete enough to compile Haiku. I do not call this progress. Maybe it is a good practice for students, but not very useful for Haiku itself.

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Yes, I agree and I don’t think we will follow up on that plan to rewrite it yet again. It seems somewhat common for people, especially beginners, to think that they can rewrite a thing and make it better, and that it would be faster than fixing the existing one.

If there’s another GSoC project about this, I’d rather see it oeing about finishing ham v1, and not starting on a v2.

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