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Hi Karl,

You raise several points here, some of which are valid. Let me try to address each one individually.

Haiku is still a moving target; the nightly builds that you use to create the superpacks/senryu not only are far from being stable, but many times they break, sometimes pretty badly. This is definitely not a good base as a tool to demonstrate the capabilities of what Haiku is expected to become in the end, nor will it give any fulfilling experience to anyone who may have any kind of end user experience the expectations. The moment you say that you want to "to provide users with a more fulfilling experience," you are creating an expectation that cannot be currently met. Which is why we do not have demo/images CDs yet.



1) First of all, you need to acknowledge that this is pre-alpha software, and that by definition it is not feature complete, nor fully functional.

2) The VMware graphics driver is left out of the official nightly builds because it does not fully work when you go into KDL. Because the nightly builds are meant to be for testing/debugging, providing functionality in the kernel debbugger is more important.

3) AFAIK, audio and network do work. But if they don't and you know what needs to be done, please provide a solution through the Haiku mailing list or Trac, to see if the solution can be included in the nightly builds. This is the best way to help Haiku.



I think you are missing the fact that there is a very specific intended audience for the nightly builds, and that this audience is expected to understand what pre-alpha software is and will therefore not jump to the kind of conclusions that your question implies. That's how we portray and position the builds, not as demos or trials.

IOW, at this point in the development of Haiku, the nightly builds are not designed or meant to impress anyone, although they are definitely impressive how good they can run at times.



Now, I think this is a valid point, and I would definitely be in favor of addressing it if possible. May I suggest that you work with Sikosis (who manages our nightly builds) to see how this can be fixed?



Good point: but you do not need to create a distro for this. An applications pack the users can download would perfectly serve this purpose, and it would save you (and me) from the burden of having to deal with branding, trademarks, guidelines, etc.



I do see your logic, but someone who will not spend time to setup their own development environment can hardly be considered as a serious candidate for Haiku development.

I do acknowledge that there may be ways to make it easier for developers to become productive sooner though. But then again, may I suggest that you try to work with Sikosis and the other Haiku devs to see what viable options can be considered to address this from within the project?



The purpose has its logic and is not the problem per se. The problem is when you put this in the context of the pre-alpha software that Haiku still is, and the various goals that the project has set for itself with regards to quality, branding, etc. That's when you start seeing the discrepancies between the (good) intentions and the potentially negative ramifications.

HTH.