[ge-talk] Possible Future Development Branch?

[Ryan Leavengood]

2008/2/29 Ian Nowland <ian.nowland at gmail.com>:
>
> What does everyone think of this idea?

Well my main question for this would be what is the benefit for Haiku,
and what is the benefit for end users?

For Haiku the benefit might be for us to say "our OS is used on x
amount of mobile devices", but beyond that I'm not sure. With the
Android compatibility layer it is not like there would be more
applications for the desktop Haiku. Though if there was a "native"
Haiku mobile API maybe it would be possible to write one app for both
desktop and mobile with just different interfaces. That would be kind
of neat, but which version of the app would take precedence? Would the
desktop version have a slightly bigger interface but the same limited
capability? Word Mobile and the full Word are quite different beasts.

For end users there may be even less benefit. In general I doubt they
would care if their Android-based phone ran Linux or Haiku behind the
scenes. Maybe if they had both a Haiku mobile device and a Haiku
desktop their might be some cool convergence features, but I can't say
how much real benefit that would be. Smooth syncing between the mobile
device and their desktop would be nice (remote BMessages for "remote
control" maybe.) But even now all that isn't too hard with properly
designed shared formats.

In my opinion the better place for Haiku outside the desktop at this
point is on ultra portables like the EeePC. From what I can see even
the most bare bone Linux install still can be quite large, whereas the
base Haiku at this point is a scant 60 MB or so, with full GUI and
quite a few useful programs. Adding a WebKit-based browser and
associated libraries might add another 25 MB at the most. Plus it is
fast and efficient and easy on memory. But I don't want to side-track
this discussion about mobile devices (though maybe it is too late for
that ;)

Regards,
Ryan