Alpha 1 Proposals

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• This page lists concrete proposals that came out of a discussion.
• All developers, plus people who offered to adopt a task now can vote.

About what you are voting for:

• This vote is about requirements for alpha 1. This means that voting in favor for something means that you want this feature to be absolutely for sure in the alpha. So for example, if you vote in favor for # 9 (fully integrate IO scheduler), you actually say that you want the release blocked until this feature is finished.
• In this same vain, voting against making a proposal mandatory for release, does not mean that in the end this feature will not end up in the release. For example, if the I/O scheduler does not get enough votes to become necessary, but it is finished in time, it might as well end up in the package. Of course, this does not work for bundled software vote.

About the voting:

• The voting is not anonymous. Your vote will be registered, and anyone who is logged into Trac, can see your vote.
• Voting starts at Sunday the 14th of September and it will end Monday the 22nd of September at 10:00 (AM) GMT.
• During the period, you may alter your vote.
• Because of technical limitations, you have to click the vote button for every vote you make. You cannot fill out the whole page and then click on one vote-button, you will lose your data.
• After the poll closes, the votes will be counted, and published.
• A proposal is accepted with a majority vote. When there is a draw, the proposal will go to the mailing list for discussion, and there will be decided what will happen.

General Proposals

The proposals are general when they apply to procedures, requirements that cannot be quantified or qualified, or tendencies that are not covered by sections deeper down.

Prop # 1: All known bugs that cause data corruption need to be resolved before the release

Adopted by: no one

• ​BGA:

  Speaking in general terms, the important thing, even for an alpha, is 
  that we have no know bug that can cause data corruption. As long as 
  we reach a point where we are reasonably certain that this is the case, 
  everything else can be attributed to it being an alpha. :)
  

Poll(Accept Proposition # 1?;Yes;No)

Prop # 2: Name the release 'Developer Release 1'

Adopted by: no one

No vote since it is a non-development related issue

Prop # 3: Create a welcome package

Adopted by: no one

• Have links on the desktop that refer first time experimenters to things that they can do next.
• Have a short 'what to do next'-guide

Poll(Accept Proposition # 3?;Yes;No)

Prop # 4: Release as the GCC 2/4 hybrid

Adopted by: no one

The release should be done in such a way that applications compiled with GCC 2 and 4 can run out of the box.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 4?;Yes;No)

Prop # 5: Make sure that a live Haiku install can be updated

Adopted by: no one

Poll(Accept Proposition # 5?;Yes;No)

Prop # 6: Recruit a Release Coordinator that investigates the needed steps

Adopted by: nielx

• The release coordinator will be a community volunteer that investigates the required work to prepare for a release, and report this info back to the developers and Haiku Inc.
• Areas of investigation should be marketing, bandwith and mirrors, procedures to streamline the release.
• The volunteer does not have to be a developer. Community members are encouraged to join in the process.
• The volunteer is selected per developer vote.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 6?;Yes;No)

Prop # 7: Set a preliminary freeze date for alpha 1

Adopted by: nielx

Set a date on which the source repository is freezed and where alpha 1 will be finished.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 7?;Yes;No)

Prop # 8: Finish and Include Swap File Support

Adopted by: bonefish

Swap file support is GSoC project. It should be got into a reasonably working state and enabled by default. Without swap file support machines with less than about 800 MB RAM won't be able to build Haiku.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 8?;Yes;No)

Prop # 9: Fully Integrate I/O Scheduler

Adopted by: bonefish

As reported the CD boot is extremely slow. Finishing and fully integrating the I/O scheduler should improve this situation significantly.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 9?;Yes;No)

Prop # 10: Read-ahead feature

Adopted by: no one

Poll(Accept Proposition # 10?;Yes;No)

Prop # 11: Recruit release manager

Adopted by: no one

The release manager should be responsible for the creation and maintenance of the R1/Alpha1 branch. That might also mean identifying changesets against trunk that should be applied or even ported to the branch once it is set up.

This person differs from proposition # 6, as in that this manager is a developer maintaining the actual code part of the release, and the release coordinator performs the marketing, mirrors and other logistics behind the release.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 11?;Yes;No)

Prop # 12: ATA vs. IDE bus manager

Adopted by: no one

There are still some pending issues with our "ide" bus manager. The "ata" bus manager seems to work better, but a) takes a long time to boot, and b) does not yet implement DMA. We should either fix "ide", or complete "ata" for the alpha.

Poll(Proposition # 12;Set "ide" as default;Set "ata" as default)

See ticket #1444 for some details on this.

Software proposals

Prop # 20: Include the Development tools

Adopted by: nielx

The development tools currently in the 'Development' package should be included. Currently that means: (​Rene Gollent)

• gcc 2.95.3
• autoconf-2.61
• automake-1.10.1
• bison-2.3
• flex-2.5.35
• jam
• libtool-1.5.26
• texinfo-4.11
• Perl 5.10

Poll(Accept Proposition # 20?;Yes;No)

Prop # 21: Include Firefox

Adopted by: nielx

Include the latest version of Firefox. nielx: "I have built Firefox before, and I have even submitted one or two patches to it, so I will take care of having a good binary that can be distributed with the alpha."

Poll(Accept Proposition # 21?;Yes;No)

Prop # 22: Include OSS

Adopted by: mmu_man

Include the OSS drivers ported by mmu_man. TODO:

• fix crash on media_server restart, dunno if it's OSS fault or device_manager though.
• blacklisting drivers that compete with native ones. easy to do either at settings file level or at compile time (commenting 1 line). This is needed to avoid KDL or hard lockups.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 22?;Yes;No)

Prop # 23: Include BePDF

Adopted by: Michael Pfeiffer

Poll(Accept Proposition # 23?;Yes;No)

Prop # 24: Include a copy of the original BeBook

Adopted by: no one

We can include the ​BeBook as released by Access.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 24?;Yes;No)

Prop # 25: Include a special Haiku-only unlocked version of Wonderbrush

Adopted by: umccullough

Offered by Stephan Assmus

Poll(Accept Proposition # 25?;Yes;No)

Prop # 26: Include a Webkit-based browser

Adopted by: Ryan Leavengood

I will be working on this now, but would not want this to be a blocker for the Alpha. Worse case it can go in Alpha 2.

Other options:

• Firefox
• NetSurf but it's not yet stable

Poll(Accept Proposition # 26 to wait for Webkit?;Yes;No)

Prop # 27: Include Vision

Adopted by: anevilyak

Poll(Accept Proposition # 27?;Yes;No)

Prop # 28: Include CVS

Adopted by: HaikuPorts

Poll(Accept Proposition # 28?;Yes;No)

Prop # 29: Include Subversion

Adopted by: nielx

Poll(Accept Proposition # 29?;Yes;No)

Prop # 30: Include Git

Adopted by: HaikuPorts

Poll(Accept Proposition # 30?;Yes;No)

Prop # 31: Include Python

Adopted by: HaikuPorts'

Poll(Accept Proposition # 31?;Yes;No)

Prop # 32: Include 'box'

Adopted by: no one

Poll(Accept Proposition # 32?;Yes;No)

Prop # 33: Include a Makefile engine to build existing projects

Adopted by: no one

Poll(Accept Proposition # 33?;Yes;No)

Prop # 34: Include Pe

Adopted by: no one

Requires fixing of #2231.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 34?;Yes;No)

Prop # 35: Include a MDR version with SSL support

Adopted by: axeld

Poll(Accept Proposition # 35?;Yes;No)

Prop # 36: Include yasm or nasm

Adopted by: HaikuPorts

yasm is obviously already ported: ​http://ports.haiku-files.org/wiki/dev-lang/yasm/0.7.1/1

Poll(Accept Proposition # 36?;Yes;No)

Distribution

All proposals that apply to the physical distribution of the operating system.

Prop # 50: Distribute as ISO that functions as LiveCD

Adopted by: no one

This one should be able to install by itself.

Plain single-track ISO, or usual boot ISO + BFS track ?

Poll(Accept Proposition # 50?;Yes;No)

Prop # 51: Distribute as Live USB stick

Adopted by: mmlr

Poll(Accept Proposition # 51?;Yes;No)

Prop # 52: Distribute as image for emulators

Adopted by: no one

For QEMU and VMWare.

Poll(Accept Proposition # 52?;Yes;No)

Prop # 53: Find mirrors and seed torrent for distribution

Adopted by: no one

No poll since it is not a development decision.

PR/Marketing

Prop # 70: Create announcement

Adopted by: no one

Jorge:

Submit to mailing lists (general/dev) + website.
This would be better coming from a (prominent) Haiku developer.
I can work on this with whoever adopts this task.

No poll since it is not a development decision

Prop # 71: Create a press release (based on #70)

Adopted by: no one

No poll since it is not a development decision

Prop # 72: website changes

Adopted by: no one

• Make availability of alpha release obvious on front page
• Add prominent links to download and Trac
• Modify "Downloads" page to show latest release + mirrors

No poll since it is not a development decision

Prop # 73: hardware matrix

Adopted by: no one

A list or database of the hardware Haiku supports should be available on our website with or before the alpha release. It would be nice if this was user-extendible, and allowed comments, too.

No poll since it is not a development decision