It's been almost three weeks since the previous blog post and some people start wondering what the current status
is and what were working on exactly, so it's time for an update. Incidentally the time is perfect for an
update anyway, since we've just reached our first important milestone: haikuporter supports hierarchical
building of packages.
After quite some delay Oliver and I have finally started our contracts with Haiku, Inc. to continue our work on package management. Each of us will work 320 hours in total, i.e. the equivalent of 2 months of continuous full-time work.
Earlier this week NFSv4 client I have been working on during the last year Google Summer of Code has been merged into the main Haiku repository and is now available in nightly images. The client supports all caching mechanisms available in the version 4 of NFS what means that it can get the most out of network connection and the server. Unfortunately due to limitations of the NFS protocol itself extended attributes are not supported yet.
An unexpected change has necessitated a delay to the start of the package management contracts. Ingo recently posted the update to the [haiku-inc] mailing list. To sum it up, the parts he is responsible for need to be updated to match changes by the customer. At this time, the delay could be anywhere from a few days of work or could be several weeks. The current plan is for Ingo and Oliver to start at the same time.
Haiku participated in Google’s Code-In for the third year in a row. This year’s event was a bit different than in 2010 and 2011. Google changed the rules a bit to make the contest better than in previous years. One of the changes was to remove the translation tasks as it seems for many of these tasks students were using Google Translator and other such tools. This meant that the biggest category for Haiku in GCI2010 and 2011 was gone, so we would have to adjust things a bit. For 2012 we had students complete 168 tasks, with ten students completing six or more tasks each. We focused more on coding and coding related tasks than in the past.
Most operating systems and desktops are moving to the “search to launch” style of starting applications. After using these for a while, I do think they speed up my core desktop usage.
I also think everyone is doing it wrong. Below are my general thoughts on this kind of application launcher:
Search to launch shouldn't distract the user. Gnome 3, Windows 8, and Unity. All of these user interfaces distract you from your work by bringing up a full-screen launcher.
I’ve had some time to play around with Haiku R1A4.1 and got it working nicely in VirtualBox, running under Windows, and also on real hardware. Along the way I made a few notes (InstallingHaikuR1A4.html) on how to get it going. I’ll describe the significant things you need to know in the rest of this blog post.
A bit late, but finally I managed to process my recordings of the talks at BeGeistert 026 “Marathon”. The quality isn’t terrific, looks like the picture was much better last time at BG 024, when we apparently didn’t darken the room so much. Audio might be slightly better, as I have used compression and a bit of filtering following advice from Haikollegue Sean Collins. I used Avidemux under Linux for de/muxing the audio track and encoding the final AVIs, and Audacity for processing the audio.
The ARM keeps moving... For people not watching the commit list closely, I’ve continued to find time to work on Haiku/ARM. So far, things look promising. No new screenshots of any kind though, but more investigation work done to get an idea of what I’m getting myself into. All in all, I’m actually quite pleased…
In my local repository (of which most is actually in the Haiku repository as well, bar some really nasty hacks that not even I dare to commit publicly) I’ve been able to get to the point where all content for a standard Haiku image is being built (the famous haiku-image target, for the devs reading this).
