Haiku monthly activity report - 06/2017

Hey there, it's time for the monthly report again!

This report covers hrev51196-hrev51253.

Kernel

time_t now uses 64-bit on 64-bit systems. This fixes the year 2038 bug for 64-bit Haiku, so we can continue to run it after 2038. This breaks the ABI, so all the 64bit packages were rebuilt.

Some bug fixes in packagefs, to avoid some annoying issues when updating the system or repeatedly installing and uninstalling packages without rebooting.

The PowerPC port is getting some attention again, with some fixes to get it to build after a few years of breakage.

WebPositive

The locking of hte URL bar was reworked to make more sense. Now the URL bar should more reliably display the URL for the current page, and still be editable while a page is loading.

There is work in progress on a new WebKit release, which will fix several crashes, in particular when using html5 videos, and some drawing glitches in javascript canvas.

Mail kit

The mail kit code was reworked to use BSocket and BSecureSocket instead of OpensSSL directly, which should simplify a few things in the code and make it easier to keep Haiku secure (as we manage OpenSSL APIs in a single central place).

Drivers

The VESA and framebuffer drivers were merged together, which means we now have a single fallback driver for all architectures, and in particular for both EFI and BIOS systems.

The serial port driver is now allowed to use the first COM port, if the kernel debugger does not use the serial output. This allows to decide wether to use the driver at run time (before, you needed to rebuild the kernel with serial debug completely disabled).

The hda driver has seen some bugfixes too, and is undergoing a larger cleanup. This should increase compatibility and the work is not complete yet.

The old "ide" driver was removed, as it has been replaced with the new "ata" one a few years back This was just unused code and there will be no regressions.