development

On Monday the 16th of June, from 09:00 GMT onwards, dev.haiku-os.org will be down for a server move and software upgrade. The website team has chosen to combine these two operations in order to minimize downtime. The operation is expected to take about three hours. Live progress updates will be offered on the#haiku channel on freenode.

The service will be moved to hosting that has been offered by Scott Palmer from Unixheads.org, a non-profit that is dedicated to providing hosting and mirroring services to open source projects. We would like to thank Scott Palmer and Unixheads.org for their very generous offer to take over the hosting of one of our services that is so vital for the community.

Update: as of now this change is in effect. If you are encountering any problems, read on to learn how to get help.

The website team is constantly trying to improve the user experience of the various websites we maintain. In order to improve our existing infrastructure, we are currently preparing a move to a new server infrastructure, which is offered by the Internet Systems Consortium. ISC is a non-profit that, amongst many other things, hosts kernel.org. We are more than grateful for this offer, which will improve our responsiveness, especially during exposure on Slashdot or OSNews.

This transition means that we have to redesign several aspects of the server infrastructure. One of these things is the user account handling. Because of the interactive nature of the main website and the bug tracker, much of the functionality is tied to user accounts. Up to now we have been able to use the user database of the main website to authenticate users against dev.haiku-os.org. However, in the new environment, we have to break this connection, until a better solution is implemented.

On Monday the 9th of June, users of dev.haiku-os.org will no longer be able to log in with the account they created on the main website. If you have ever logged in on dev.haiku-os.org, you will be affected by this change. You will receive an email with a new (randomly generated) password, which you will be able to change to your liking.

Read on for a short list of questions and answers.

For a Haikuware Bounty, Ryan Leavengood set out to port WebKit, a framework to render modern web contents. Actually, from the start it was supposed to be a first shot to get the basics to compile for Haiku, as a complete port is a huge endeavour that keeps a skilled team busy for many months.

The deadline for the bounty has recently been reached and the set goal has been achieved more or less. Read Ryan's summary at Haikuware for the details.

Now that the first step is taken, everyone's invited to help further develop and later on optimize and streamline the code. Marcus Jacob and Andrea Anzani have already stepped up to give Ryan a hand.

The plan is to have the port hosted directly in the official WebKit repository. Before that can happen a few more basics need to be implemented, which should happen within the next few weeks.

Ryan has provided a developer's document with detailed build instructions for those who wish to work on the port. Check it out.

Some will argue that these were just meaningless numbers, nevertheless we have reached significant milestones today: 1000th bug entry, and even better, 20000th subversion change. Recent subversion changes include many bug fixes and several additions in the file system area.

Several file system add-ons were ported from BeOS (Haiku has a different VFS interface):

• NTFS, using a GPLed libntfs, should even handle writing if you don't mind some risk of losing data.
• NFSv2, from an add-on once published on BeBits, should allow using files from Unix servers and maybe someday be used for network booting along with PXE.
• GoogleFS, a tech demo showing how queries can be handed over to Google.

In other additions, Marcus Overhagen finished implementing PXE support. PXE is the first step to providing network boot support. The kernel still needs to be programmed to mount the boot volume from the network.