I’ve just uploaded some files onto http://dev.osdrawer.net/projects/perl-haiku-kits/files They are minimal implementations (window with a button) for Perl and Python. The Perl one works fine, but I’m still having issues with the Python.
Here are some of the issues with Python:
Apparently by convention packages start with a lower-case letter. The bindings are currently in the ‘Haiku’ package. This would be a trivial change; it depends on how important it is to Haiku’s Python user community.
A lot of commits have happened since I last blogged on my GSOC Project. The big hitters are:
the framework of a rankings website for users’ point totals A non-regex parser I wrote because I’m impatient (I’m going to test its speed.) The begining of the http server that will inform user’s builddrones of availible jobs (builds) [Basically it tells you if packages have been updated so you can build them] Verified that Camlistore (on python) can work on Haiku.
After a week of working on the package management support as per my contract with Haiku, Inc., I have reached my first milestone: The base system is packaged... and it boots again. Here's a short account of what I have been doing exactly and what I'm up to next.
My quarter term goals for the ZFS port included porting all the libzpool dependencies to Haiku. Out of four major dependencies -- libavl, libnvpair, libuutil and libumem -- I already have two -- libavl and libnvpair -- building on Haiku. libumem and libuutil will take another few days, which puts me at least a week behind my original schedule.
I'm currently working on porting libuutil, which is presenting a few roadblocks but nothing that can't be fixed in one day's work.
During the first few weeks of GSoC, I’ve gotten vboxsf, the shared folders module, mostly working, though I’m a bit behind where I’d like to be due to unexpected things repeatedly coming up both in physical-land and on my development setup. All supported functionality is working when accessed from the terminal - at this point I’m just optimizing and working on a bug where looking at a shared folder the wrong way in Tracker causes the kernel to panic.
The topic of implementing compositing in the app_server comes up once in a while. I have outlined my thoughts on the subject more than once, but these are burried in mailing list archives. Since I have just written another overview of how this could be approached, I thought I might better put this up as an article here, so I can point people to it in the future.
I am going to give an overview only. It is intended to help anyone along when reading the app_server code and piecing things together. These are direction that I think are guaranteed to work OK, and with the minimal amount of changes, but anyone taking up this task needs to figure out the actual implementation himself, of course. Here it goes...
As anticipated, I was able to do little more than set up my environment during the first stretch of GSOC and the last few weeks of school and my previous internship. I was able to find computer with a compatible network and graphics card, which should hopefully be faster than running Haiku on a virtual machine on my normal computer. I also successfully installed haikuporter, although I am having some trouble using it.
These weeks were prolific in terms of design and experiments but due to university commitments i am a bit late with the expected goals. At this point i have an implementation of BContact / BRawContact and i’m working to get the VCard translator functional. In these hours my focus is the communication part between the raw contacts and translators.
One of the latest design decisions was to make BRawContact own a translator that is suitable for writing the format specified by the user, otherwise it will use the default B_CONTACT_FORMAT (a flattened BMessage) for the final file.
On June 7, I turned in my dissertation and my semester ended. On June 10, I had my first final exam. Now it’s time to produce a progress report for Haiku. Almost miraculously, I’ve actually managed to squeeze some Haiku development time in and am making progress of a kind.
The most tangible progress is mostly in the form of debug messages and crashes into Kernel debug land, but I consider anything that I do which has a measurable effect to be progress.
During the first quarter, I defined an interface language to use for creating the bindings. I had to create my own for several reasons. Probably the biggest factor was the need to know whether the target language has the right to destroy an object. Most of the target languages has some kind of automatic garbage collection; the programmer never needs to worry about whether to delete an object to free up memory.
