During this summer I was working under my mentor Jerome Duval’s guidance. This is the first time I tried to be part of the GSOC program.
I started reading as many documents about HAIKU as I can find before I was accepted on 11th April. I checked out the haikus’s source and built it and tested it on qemu. I was shocked by its clean and user-friendly desktop. I started reading its source after 1st May.
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post, here’s the summary for last week’s activity in Haiku-land.
This week saw the driver for AHCI SATA controllers begun in earnest, the beginnings of job control support in the shell (and associated kernel stuff), a Sudoku game added to the image, and more bugs squashed.
There was also a discussion on the development mailing list about “hybrid” images of Haiku, allowing both GCC 2 and GCC 4 compiled apps to work on the same system.
A couple of months ago there was a debate on the mailing list about the openness of the Haiku project. I made the point that there was a lot of information in the public domain - SVN commits logs, bug updates, and a multitidue of mailing lists - the problem was that activity on these fronts was not obvious to more casual Haiku-watchers. I should have kept my mouth shut, because I ended up agreeing to write some summaries of this activity! This is the first of what will hopefully be weekly updates. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions below.
I have been documenting my progress on porting the WebKit project to Haiku on the Haikuware site, but decided to also post information here. You may want to read my previous blog article about this port and also the information at the WebKit bounty on Haikuware. Please consider donating to a bounty.
Before I started work on this port I asked in the #webkit IRC channel what the mimimum version of GCC that was required to compile WebKit. The general consensus was 4.0. So what does that mean?
Whenever I was with Axel and saw Haiku running on his IBM ThinkPad T40p, I was almost convinced, that he must have forgotten to commit a rather effective patch, though he swore that that was not the case. I have never seen the app_server perform so well on any other machine.
My backpack turned out really heavy, because at the moment, I have no mobile computer. Luckily I have one of those "industry embedded" machines, as big as an external CD-ROM drive. But I still had to pack my 17" flat screen. The travelling by train was nice, although I almost got off at the wrong station in Basel. I mean, I did get off, but I got back in in time.
Haiku Admin Meeting 2007-07-23: A quick GSoC status was discussed. It was agreed that having Axel and Ingo working together in the same location to focus on many of the VM and stability issues was a successful endeavor: It was proposed that this be done more often, with possible sponsorship from Haiku, Inc. to pay for costs whenever possible. It was agreed that Axel and/or Ingo will be reimbursed for any expenses that were incurred.
Haiku Admin Meeting 2007-07-02: Discussion about WalterCon planning. Things are moving along. The existence of a project called RadiantOS which claims to eventaully be a "distro" based on Haiku was mentioned. There was some discussion about the status of running GCC in Haiku: Haiku might be close to self-hosting capability (able to build itself). It was mentioned that once Haiku can self-host it's probably time for an official alpha release.
Even though I had some private issues this week, all is going well with the PackageInstall. In its current form it is able to properly install all 3 test BeOS packages I tried on it, creating files and directories along with their data and attributes without flaw. So, what’s left to do right now?
For the API Documentation team I’ve prepared an overview of the messaging functions in the Application Kit, mind map style. This image should be the guide to writing the actual API documentation.
Please redirect comments on the technical content to the haiku-development list. They are highly appreciated!
