Alpha 1 Proposals

Voting is now closed.

• This page lists concrete proposals that came out of a discussion.
• All developers, plus people who offered to adopt a task now can vote.
• Most of the proposals are accepted, some are rejected and two are pending, since they tied during the voting.

This page is open for changes regarding the descriptions of the proposals, but please steer clear from the vote results.

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.

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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. :)
  

Status: Accepted (13 against 1)

In favour: nielx, emitrax, anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, mmlr, umccullough, stippi, axeld, mauricek, aldeck, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: scottmc

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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

Status: Rejected (6 against 7)

In favour: stippi, scottmc, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man

Against: nielx, emitrax, anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, umccullough, sikosis

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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.

Status: Accepted (7 against 4)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, mmlr, mmu_man

Against: nielx, scottmc, umccullough, sikosis

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

Adopted by: no one

Status: Rejected (2 against 9)

In favour: nielx, axeld

Against: dlmcpaul, leavengood, mmlr, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, stippi, mauricek, sikosis

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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.

Status: Accepted (11 against 1)

In favour: nielx, emitrax, anevilyak, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: dlmcpaul

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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.

Status: Pending (5 against 5)

In favour: nielx, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, mauricek

Against: mmlr, bonefish, stippi, axeld, sikosis

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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.

Status: Accepted (15 against 1)

In favour: nielx, stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, jackburton, mmlr, umccullough, bonefish, axeld, mauricek, aldeck, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: scottmc

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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.

Status: Accepted (9 against 4)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mmu_man

Against: nielx, scottmc, umccullough, sikosis

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Prop # 10: Read-ahead feature

Adopted by: no one

Status: Rejected (2 against 6)

In favour: emitrax, dlmcpaul

Against: nielx, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, mmlr, sikosis

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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.

Status: Rejected (4 against 6)

In favour: dlmcpaul, scottmc, axeld, mauricek

Against: nielx, leavengood, umccullough, stippi, mmlr, sikosis

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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.

Status: ATA as bus manager (3 against 6)

In favour of IDE: nielx, dlmcpaul, leavengood

In favour of ATA: scottmc, umccullough, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, sikosis

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

Status Accepted (15 against 0)

In favour: nielx, stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man, sikosis

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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."

Status: Accepted (14 against 0)

In favour: nielx, stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, sikosis

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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.

Status: Accepted (11 against 1)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: nielx

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Prop # 23: Include BePDF

Adopted by: Michael Pfeiffer

Status: Accepted (12 against 2)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: nielx, scottmc

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Prop # 24: Include a copy of the original BeBook

Adopted by: no one

We can include the ​BeBook as released by Access.

Status: Accepted (10 against 2)

In favour: nielx, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, axeld, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: emitrax, mmlr

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

Adopted by: umccullough

Offered by Stephan Assmus

Status: Accepted (11 against 1)

In favour: emitrax, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, bonefish, stippi, mmlr, axeld, aldeck, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: nielx

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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

Status: Rejected (0 against 13)

Against: nielx, stippi, emitrax, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mmu_man, sikosis

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Prop # 27: Include Vision

Adopted by: anevilyak

Status: Accepted (11 against 2)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, aldeck, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: nielx, dlmcpau

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Prop # 28: Include CVS

Adopted by: HaikuPorts

Status: Accepted (10 against 3)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, aldeck, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: nielx, dlmcpaul, leavengood

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Prop # 29: Include Subversion

Adopted by: nielx

Status: Accepted (16 against 0)

In favour: nielx, stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man, sikosis

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Prop # 30: Include Git

Adopted by: HaikuPorts

Status: Rejected (2 against 5)

In favour: emitrax, scottmc

Against: nielx, dlmcpaul, leavengood, mmlr, sikosis

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Prop # 31: Include Python

Adopted by: HaikuPorts'

Status: Pending (4 against 4)

In favour: emitrax, dlmcpaul, scottmc, aldeck

Against: nielx, leavengood, mmlr, sikosis

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Prop # 32: Include 'box'

Adopted by: no one

Status: Rejected (0 against 9)

Against: nielx, dlmcpaul, leavengood, emitrax, scottmc, umccullough, mmlr, axeld, sikosis

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

Adopted by: no one

Status: Accepted (12 against 1)

In favour: nielx, stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, umccullough, mmlr, axeld, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: scottmc

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Prop # 34: Include Pe

Adopted by: no one

Requires fixing of #2231.

Status: Accepted (13 against 1)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: nielx

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Prop # 35: Include a MDR version with SSL support

Adopted by: axeld

Status: Rejected (4 against 6)

In favour: anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, axeld, mauricek

Against: nielx, emitrax, scottmc, umccullough, mmlr, sikosis

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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

Status: Accepted (9 against 2)

In favour: stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, mmlr, axeld, aldeck

Against: nielx, sikosis

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 ?

Status: Accepted (15 against 1)

In favor: nielx, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, jackburton, umccullough, bonefish, stippi, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man, sikosis

Against: scottmc

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Prop # 51: Distribute as Live USB stick

Adopted by: mmlr

Status: Accepted (9 against 0)

In favour: nielx, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, scottmc, mmlr, sikosis

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Prop # 52: Distribute as image for emulators

Adopted by: no one

For QEMU and VMWare.

Status: Accepted (16 against 0)

In favour: nielx, stippi, emitrax, anevilyak, aldeck, dlmcpaul, leavengood, jackburton, scottmc, umccullough, bonefish, mmlr, axeld, mauricek, mmu_man, sikosis

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Prop # 53: Find mirrors and seed torrent for distribution

Adopted by: no one

No poll since it is not a development decision.