Rather than an actual “website”, why can’t someone just host a real, open FTP server somewhere as a backend that could accept package/application submissions, and have HaikuDepot tap into that as a frontend? That would solve the problem, although the traffic considerations would be a serious factor.
Building a package repository for haikudepot is rather easy, with the package_repo tool (available in haiku or in the cross-build tools).
If there is a repo like this available, with lots of good software, it probably could become part of the default haiku configuration. Right now we provide haikuports because it has some important system dependencies, a reasonable choice of packages, and good quality recipes for easily repeatable builds (having packages and no recipes sometimes make updates and bugfixes difficult). But if other repos become available, we can see about including them. Of course a request for that should be sent to haiku-development, ideally by the repo owner (who handles the bandwidth limitations on the repo).
I said that in the future, when HaikuDepot has lots of apps, etc, then Haikuware won’t be as useful. As of today, it would be very useful to list applications that need to be packaged for HaikuDepot.
I think we need to do this outside of haikuports, too many gate-keepers, too much politics. I will post a how-to when I get some time, but it isn’t that hard, and without the haikuports nit-pickers we should be able to build a community repo that fills the gap.
Just a heads up, after all this started (the sites being taken offline), I registered the haikubits.net domain, in case it became useful.
I have the hosting space and the bandwidth, so I’d be happy to set something up as well or just give the domain to Haiku themselves so they can use it.
haikuarchives is only for open source software. This is very far from covering what was available on bebits. It is also very oriented towards collaborative development, which is not suitable for everyone.
I am hosting some files at http://pulkomandy.tk/~beosarchive/unsorted . This is a mirror of various FTP I could still find online. Let me know if you have some files that you think should be stored there, or contact me if you want to setup a mirror of these things. We are also in contact with archive.org to see if they can host some of the software, and how.
These are however, only archiving efforts, and have little room for new software. But it seems bbjimmy is taking care of that part now.
It seems that PulkoMandy has read more into my posts than I intended. yes, I set-up a repo for Fat Elk Software, no, I do not have enough bandwidth to host a large repo for the community.
I said that I would explain how to create a repo. It took so long because I have been busy working on yab:
DaaT, It seems that you have what we need, now we need someone who is a web guru with time on their hands to make a site that can host zip and pkg files and a repo for .hpkg files.
The “Bits” part refers back to the old BeBits - which had been originally set-up by Sean Heber and Greg Nichols (see http://www.osnews.com/story/20702/BeBits_Gets_New_Owner/ ) - and had been maintained since 2008 by Karl Von Dorff.
There is a COM domain with the same name, keeping pretty much with the mixture of listed websites coming up on web searches - some referring to the operating system and most referring to the poetic form.
By-the-way, did you registered as HaikuBits or as haikubits?
That question doesn’t mean anything, the Domain Name System is built around case-crushed ASCII text. IDNs not withstanding, there isn’t a way to express the difference between these two names in DNS.
