Contract weekly report #52 - On to beta1!

Hi,

This week I continued work on moving Beta1 forward, fixing some important and less important bugs. To make things clear about what to expect in the upcoming weeks, I will spend more time on Beta1 tasks, but I’ll also continue working on WebKit. However, my work there will focus on fixing bugs, rather than adding new features.

So, this week I continued reviewing the beta1 and R1 tickets. There were still some low hanging fruits that I solved last friday and during the weekend. I fixed the docbook toolchain we still use to build the Haiku Interface Guidelines. This was broken for a long time because it uses an old copy of libxml in the Haiku tree. What I did is merging a patch there to make it work with a current zlib, so things work again. We should probably get rid of the whole thing and require people willing to build the documentation to install docbook on their system - which is easy now, even on Haiku as I did packages for that. It would be nice to see some activity on updating the HIG again. It’s getting old and we have changed our rules a bit over time to accomodate for larger and higher resolution displays, and modernize the UI a bit. We have also drifted away from BeOS in some subtle aspects. And the HIG could be made more easily browsable and styled to the Haiku theme like the user guide or API docs are. For the record an HTML version is online here: https://api.haiku-os.org/HIG/

I updated the Mesa package to fix a BeOS compatibility issue. libGL was not linked to libbe, and when running old BeOS apps you would often get an error that ‘be_bold_font’ could not be found. Puckipedia did all thehard work on investigating the problem during BeGeistert, all I had to do was fix and rebuild the Mesa package. It is for example possible to run Pixel on Haiku now.

I also fixed various other small issues, such as a localization problem in AboutSystem, getting the “enable on startup” checkbox in Notifications to work, improving the selection/zoom algorithm in Mandelbrot to be easier to use, fixed several drawing glitches in the MAcDecorator, fixed the build of the bluetooth stack, updated VL-Gothic fonts to the current version.

During the weekend and some evenings as well (so this isn’t counted in my contract time) I helped miqlas get Homeworld running on Haiku. This appears to be a rather nice game from 1999 which is now open source. There were two problems, one was a broken libsdl_x86 package that led to the game rendering in a 32x48 pixels area in a corner of its window, and the other being a compilation flag used in Homeworld leading to structure padding problems and a crash.

Finally, I did some embedded development this week with an STM32 development board, and this led to the upload of an STM32flash package, as well as adding some scripting support to SerialConnect so it can be used in collaboration with stm32flash. Nothing really useful to the general public here.

So, that was a busy week-end. Unfortunately the week wasn’t as productive, but here is a list of things I spent my contract time on this week: