Assuming the previous alpha releases were published due to certain development milestones, what key developments have occurred either since alpha four or remain to be done that might constitute an unofficial alpha five? Or are we up to something like an alpha seven by now?
Not really. Releasing an alpha of Haiku requires a tremendous amount of effort, both technical effort and management effort. This dwarfs any actual purpose or goal such as a milestone.
Haiku alphas occur only when somebody throws that effort at the problem. The technical effort means this needs to be someone with the technical capability to do all or most of the work themselves, or they’ll get bogged down and achieve nothing as “volunteers” evaporate. The management effort means it needs to be someone able to command respect from all the developers, and with the constitution needed to wade through incessant arguments and excuses, plus just straight up time availability needed to intercede constantly to keep the process actually moving or it will stall out.
Hi peroxidechicken,
ther was a lot of discussion happyning about this … on the mailing list and here in the forum…
Here is just one example.
https://www.haiku-os.org/community/forum/next_releasealphabeta
The next goal is the first Beta. The challenge is, we had one guy (PulkoMandy) who was planning an working on this full time… So there was estimated that it could be released buy the middle of last year or something like this.
But then haiku inc ran out of money and couldnt pay him any more.
You can follow how “far” from completion the Beta is here:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/milestone/R1/beta1
and for details you can look here:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/query?status=assigned&status=in-progress&status=reopened&status=new&group=status&milestone=R1%2Fbeta1
Hope this helps…
I am really hoping that in the next year we will see beta 1 … as haiku kitchen are close to working and packagagemanagement kind of stable 
Anyway until then you can have fun with the nighlys they are quite stable (also i saw some kdls verry recently)
Isn’t the whole alpha/beta thing a little arbitrary? Every nightly is a “beta” - and when the first release comes, it will really just be a “beta” for which the currect ticket list has been completed. Two weeks later, there will be as many tickets as six months before the release.
I realize that what people are saying is that they want “the beta” or “the release” because that means certain milestones have been reached in the cross-country race they think of as the development process. WIndows is still a “beta” - excepting for the marketing that doesn’t admit it. Well, anyway, I don’t place so much emphasis on the status, whether it’s alpha, beta, or zeta. Remember zeta - heck - they were acknowledging my POV. Ha - but really, I find whatever product available at the time, at whatever milestone or marketing status level, try to use it for my purposes, and if it works then good and fine.
More important is the level of collaboration, bug tracking, resolution, etc. If that’s waning because there are fewer bugs, then we have a better beta. If that’s waning because the developers all have new girlfriends, then thatss a different story. But i digress …
Here is a list of major improvements to Haiku since Alpha 4:
- Introduction of the Package Manager, HaikuDepot, HaikuPorter,
- New scheduler with 8+ cores
- Improved debugger
- Improvements to WebPositive browser
- Experimental support for CLANG
- Support for GCC 4.8
- NFS V4
- Many improvements to Haiku 64
- Experimental TRIM support for SSDs
There’s more but these are the big items.
[quote=ronald-scheckelhoff]
I realize that what people are saying is that they want “the beta” or “the release” because that means certain milestones have been reached in the cross-country race they think of as the development process. [/quote]
If you’ve ever tried to do any serious amount of application development in Haiku you would realize that being in an Alpha state makes things pretty frustrating at times. The compiler support changes, the development tools stop working, libraries change, the browser stops working, when you upgrade your nightly version to fix a bug you get several new bugs. In my capacity as Haiku Application Group evangelist I have asked some developers to consider porting something or other to Haiku. Their response is that they will wait until at least a Beta release.
[quote=AndrewZ]
If you’ve ever tried to do any serious amount of application development in Haiku you would realize that being in an Alpha state makes things pretty frustrating at times. The compiler support changes, the development tools stop working, libraries change, the browser stops working, when you upgrade your nightly version to fix a bug you get several new bugs. In my capacity as Haiku Application Group evangelist I have asked some developers to consider porting something or other to Haiku. Their response is that they will wait
until at least a Beta release.[/quote]
I see your point - which is that setting another alpha or a beta milestone as a “fixed target” for app development reduces the trouble caused to the developers of applications. As a nightly user I get along OK, but I’m not doing the development and don’t see the app dev’s “pulling their hair” - like you say - behind the scenes.
OK, so perhaps they should give you the incremented stable dev target to work against. Maybe you need to say to them what you said to me 