Haiku monthly activity report - 02/2017

Hello world!

Let’s see what happened in Haiku this month. This report covers hrevs 50928 to 50988.

waddlsplash worked on enabling real subpixel rendering in Haiku. This used to be protected by Microsoft patents, but they are all expired or will expire really soon. So, it is time to start experimenting with this and getting ready for enabling it.

waddlesplash also reworked the JSON API, and fixed several bugs found by the “JSON Minefield” tests. This makes our parser more compatible with all kinds of JSON data, and also easier to use.

humdinger added localization support to the package daemon and solver, allowing for pkgman and HaikuDepot to be fully translated.

More patches from mt were merged, in order to make it possible to build Haiku with GCC 6. This is still a work in progress, as GCC6 finds several new warnings also in 3rd-party code that was imported into Haiku. This code should be at least updated to a newer version, and at best, moved to packages.

korli investigated and fixed some bugs in our pthread API, in order to increase compatibility and make it easier to port software.

Dariusz Knociński improved the Polish keymap, adding various special characters (various kinds of typographic quotes, apostrophes, etc).

kallisti5 fixed a problem with host-only builds resulting in an infinite recursion in Jam (it was trying to include the same jamfile over and over again because of an unset variable). Now it is possible to build Haiku host tools only, without targetting a specific architecture. This is used by the package buildbots as they need the generic “package” tool, but nothing arch specific.

humdinger reworked the layout of Tracker info window, to fix some overlapped text depending on font and font size.

axeld fixed a memory leak in bfs.

tqh tweaked our ACPI code to fix all warnings, and enabled Werror so the compiler will now complain if someone adds warning-generating code in that area.

Skipp_osx added case insensitive comparison methods to BString, and used them to fix some bugs in the legacy PackageInstaller (to install SoftwareValet packages from BeOS).

kallisti5 worked on preparing support for AMD Ryzen CPUs (new cpuinfo fields) and reviewed XHCI/USB3 code for potential issues.

nielx worked on updating our Pootle install and cleaned up some problems with deprecated catalogs, missing languages, etc.

Lioncash fixed some memory leaks and late NULL pointer checks.

jua made many improvements to our FUSE layer, and used it to port and extend the fusesmb filesystem, allowing to access Windows network shared drives (or anything using the same protocol). This is nicely integrated in the Network preferences thanks to the add-on support there.

Kyle Ambroff helped investigate and fix a freeze of the network preferences, when trying to configure a network in static mode.

Are we released yet?

There are some good news about the beta1 release this month.

First, not mentioned above are a lot of package updates in the repositories, in order to keep them close to the release branches at haikuports.

But more importantly, the move of the haiku website and forums to new hosting was completed, freeing some space on our servers. kallisti5 used that space to set up a new buildmaster instance (much better than the half disassembled laptop in my basement I used for testing until now).

We are now working on connecting everything together: exposing a web interface showing the status of the builders, making changes to haikuports git repos trigger an automated build of the changed packages and update of the repos, etc. Having the server hosted on Haiku controlled infrastructure helps collaborating on that and should also make the builds faster, as the build master can upload packages to the slaves, and download from them, at a more decent speed than my home internet access allowed until now.