The news:
As reported by Thom Holwerda of OSnews, there was recently some constructive chat on the mailing listabout how Haikuware’s Haiku distribution should conform to Haiku Distribution Guidelines. Karl vom Dorff made a pretty good work into achieving conformance and the result is SenryÅ«.
SenryÅ« is the new name of what was previously known as Haikuware Superpack. It is based on haiku pre-alpha code and contains applications and development tools (since haiku is “self-hosting” from several weeks now). Two flavors are available as VMware(tm) images the Personal Edition and the Developer Edition. If you’d like to know more aboutthe meaning of the name have a look here.
More about Senryū, downloads, etc. at Haikuware.com.
The philosophical question:
But again, there still is the long time existing question among the community of whether or not it is time to have this kind of distribution, and at this moment in time (i.e. based on pre-alpha quality software)…
You’ll find on the mailing list (this thread) as well as in the OSnews article’s comment section source for reflection. What can be noticed today is that both Haikuware and Haiku-os.org, in their differences of opinions, act in a way they think will help Haiku.
Koki (Haiku-os.org):
“At this stage, Haiku is targeting only developers, primarily those who can contribute code and/or do some serious testing/debugging. Anybody who does not have the inclination to spend the time or the ability to setup his/her own development environment simply does not fall into this category.”
Karl vom Dorff (Haikuware.com):
“I’ve tried many BeOS applications under Haiku, and many didn’t work (many did too
. After testing failing binaries, I filed bug reports, which led to bugs being uncovered in Haiku, which led to Haiku becoming more stable and Haiku’s vision of being binary compatible inch closer to its goal. This is what I hope for with these disk images.”
My personal thinking is that as long as people are smart enough (yeah, maybe this is the problematic assumption … ) to understand that those images are a snapshot of what Haiku can achieve in its actual pre-alpha state, and not a view on what it can’t do or what it will become, this is fine. For instance, I was asking peolple to test the Niue 3 developpment environment. I can’t have a computer on which I can install Haiku today and I was very pleased to find this latest version included in SenryÅ«.
Without starting a flame war, your advice is welcome in the comments.
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