Recently some discussions on the forum led to asking about the status of our Gerrit code review.
There are a lot of changes there that have been inactive for several years, with no apparent
interest from anyone. To be precise, there are currently 358 commits waiting for review (note that
Gerrit, unlike Github and other popular code review tools, works on a commit-by-commit basis, so
each commit from a multiple-commit change is counted separately). The oldes tone has not seen any
comments since 2018.
This blog post was originally a forum post. It is reproduced here on the website to make it easier to find and reference.
I heard that some more people may be interesting in helping with WebKit. So here is a summary of the current state, the things I think need work, or the possible future paths to explore.
Keeping WebKitLegacy up and running
The Web moves fast these days. So we have to stay very up to date with upstream WebKit. Until we have a nice and shiny WebKit2 browser, and, anyways, even after that, we need to keep things up to date.
Happy new year!
Note: this report covers changes only to the Haiku main git repository. There are many other things
going on for Haiku outside that git repository. In recent big news, we have an X11 compatibility
layer, and a running experimental Wine port. However, I cannot cover everything in these reports.
Help welcome if you want to contribute to our website with news announcements for such items.
That being said, let’s see what’s going on in Haiku itself!
Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report!
This report covers hrev55609-hrev55687.
New architectures
Kallisti5 fixed some minor problems with the PowerPC port to keep it building and simplify it a bit.
Kallisti5 and waddlesplash also continued cleaning up the RISC-V sources and fixing various minor issues there.
David Karoly is making progress on the 32bit ARM port, using EFI as a boot method. The previous
attempts for an ARM port used the linux style booting, where the firmware bootloader (usually uboot)
only does the minimal hardware initialization, and then hands over complete control to the operating
system. The Linux kernel is designed to work this way, but in our case, we actually rely a bit more
on the firmware, to run our stage 2 bootloader which provides an user friendly boot menu.
Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report!
This report covers hrev55452-hrev55608.
Kernel
Waddlesplash made the kernel always build with gcc8, even on 32bit systems. It was built with gcc2
until now, but it was not possible to use BeOS drivers anymore since the introduction of SMAP and
other features, which led to slight changes in the driver ABI. No one complained, so there is no
reason to preserve BeOS driver compatibility further. This should result in performance improvements
for 32bit installations, as the new compiler is much better at optimizing code. And it will allow
kernel developers to use more modern C++ features.
Hello there, it’s time for the monthly activity report!
This report covers hrev55343-hrev55451.
app_server
PulkoMandy reworked the way the screen is taken out of DPMS power saving mode when app_server
first starts. This should have no consequences on most hardware since the screen will normally
already be up during the boot screen, but the way it was implemented led to some confusion in
existing drivers, as we tried to turn the screen on before the driver had a chance to set a video
mode on its own. So this code is moved a little later in the setup sequence.
Hi there, let’s do another activity report! You may have noticed that there were a lot of news
since the previous one, but here’s a recap in case you missed it: a new beta release, the
celebration of the 20th birthday of the Haiku project, the end of Google Summer of Code (final
evaluations are being filled in as I write this), and also news from the promotion team which was
re-launched a few months ago and is working on various things (read their own report for more details).
Hello, it’s time for the May activity report!
Before starting the report, we would like to thank our donors for their donations. Your donations help us cover our expenses and help us reach our goal to hire people to work on Haiku full-time. We would also like to thank all the community for their countless hours of effort of implementing new features, triaging bugs, translating, supporting other users, and spreading the Haiku word all around.
This report covers revisions hrev54979-hrev55069.
HaikuDepot
Andrew Lindesay continues his work on HaikuDepot, fixing a glitch in redrawing
of featured packages. He completed the removal of the custom list class, so
HaikuDepot uses standard container classes from C++ or Haiku APIs. This makes
the code more similar to other parts of Haiku and easier to maintain.
With this rework done, Andrew is now working on new features. The first of these
is a counter for views of packages, which will allow to imrpove the way we decide
which packages are “featured” in HaikuDepot home screen.
