The situation

[terminills]

Dear friends.

I'm a fan of everything Amiga related. Ever since I discovered AROS around 15 years ago I had big hopes for it.
Time move on and they way we deal with computing move on.
I learned a lot throuh the years about Amiga and alternatives.
I did a lot for AROS through the years. Donating Money, creating a distribution "www.aspireos.com", A lot of beta testing and reports.
I regret nothing. I learned a lot and had fun, but also been frustrating.

Since almost all OS developers left and there been very little activity the last years, I tought it could be a good idea to talk about AROS and a possible future.

My opinion at least for now is this.
AROS targeted to be an open source Amiga like OS for new, powerfull hardware but also for classic.
I would say as a NG system AROS failed. Not cause it is worse than alternatives. AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROS have all failed trying to compete, being an alternative to modern computing operative systems.

We know the Vampire team now support AROS 68k. First of all for legal reasons. I now think this is where AROS can have a life into the future.
The problem is that if nothing is done to continue AROS 68k there will probably be other alternatives that might leave AROS in the dust.

We all know the legal problems with Amiga 68k but it might be solved and Amiga OS classic is being worked on. Next version Amiga 3.2

Remember noone care about muliti core, memory protection etc. etc. for Amiga classic. We don't have that problem there. AROS 68k have so much going for it. We have free USB stack, free network solution, Zune etc. et. I hope people start compile software and improve the compatiblety to the classic Amiga OS.

AROS runs fast on Vampire and I would love to see native software like Zune Tools on it.

Amiga classic is where new original games are developed. All sceners that do demos and mods. use classic Amiga systems up to 060 as Reference. Look at www.pouet.net and you will see a lot of productions last years and still very much alive.

Glad to hear what you think about AROS and the future.

There's been plenty going on with AROS.   As for how to talk about AROS's future I've seen a ton of these threads by people who don't commit code throughout the years.   Here's how non-developers can contribute.   Test, Financial support or, get others involved.   We as AROS users are one of the biggest issues with AROS.  We sit here and whine about what we want.  Then once it's contributed we never bother to test and give feedback.

[wawa]

btw. i have been asked to post here, that "that it’s possible to update the website via github if anyone’s up to the task".
the repository is
https://github.com/aros-development-team

[deadwood]

(...) but its this is imho a bit of problematic, because even if it drags abi v0 along a while longer it also postpones the development and transition to abi v1.

Why do you think so?

[Amiwell]

deadwood I downloaded the alternative branch abiv0, I saw that it is more recent than the last available, sin for gallium

[Amiwell]

@terminills

we are discussing why not keep a stable branch at the moment, instead of leaving it in limbo waiting for when the 64 bit time comes, it seems to me a sensible thing what I say

[wawa]

(...) but its this is imho a bit of problematic, because even if it drags abi v0 along a while longer it also postpones the development and transition to abi v1.

Why do you think so?

because resources that could be invested into abi v1 are being saturated by maintenance of abi v0, beyond what it was supposed to be. thats at least how i understand the situation.

[deadwood]

(...) but its this is imho a bit of problematic, because even if it drags abi v0 along a while longer it also postpones the development and transition to abi v1.

Why do you think so?

because resources that could be invested into abi v1 are being saturated by maintenance of abi v0, beyond what it was supposed to be. thats at least how i understand the situation.

That is general statement that might be true if we were a company with a budget, but what resources are you exactly reffering to in case of AROS?

[wawa]

@terminills

we are discussing why not keep a stable branch at the moment, instead of leaving it in limbo waiting for when the 64 bit time comes, it seems to me a sensible thing what I say

who has taken a stable branch from you? has icaros i386 ceased to work? does anyone prevent people to compile for it? whats your problem??

[deadwood]

deadwood I downloaded the alternative branch abiv0, I saw that it is more recent than the last available, sin for gallium

It should not be. In general alt-abiv0 is what I saved from old SVN before it went dark so it should be identical to latest build that for example Icaros is based off.

[wawa]

but what resources are you exactly reffering to in case of AROS?

not monetary resources of course. contributors. people like yourself.

[terminills]

@terminills

we are discussing why not keep a stable branch at the moment, instead of leaving it in limbo waiting for when the 64 bit time comes, it seems to me a sensible thing what I say

I know what's being discussed.  Here's why, unless it's opensource or the source is passed down.  It will possibly break once ABIv1 is completed anyway and get tossed and we'll be back at square one.  Also stable doesn't mean fixed.   So how do you fix AROS when application developers are writing workarounds for a "stable" branch and not working with the core developers to point out the bugs in AROS?   When I bought Finalwriter and watched its development.  I learned that application development helped in locating bugs in the OS itself.

[Amiwell]

I understand ok, @wawa i thinked a new version of gallium to be applied and that's it

[deadwood]

but what resources are you exactly reffering to in case of AROS?

not monetary resources of course. contributors. people like yourself.

Sure, but then you assume that I would otherwise spend energy on working on ABIv1.

The argument about "slowing" ABIv1 "by keeping ABIv0 refreshed" keeps resurfacing.

The only "resource" that was expended on keeping ABIv0 refreshed was my time. All other contributions were actually backports from fixes done in "trunk" so nothing was lost or wasted.

Funny thing is that actually while doing the initial backport to ABIv0 I fixed numerous things that got broken in ABIv1 because it was never put into hands of users. So actually my working on backporting to ABIv0 contributed to ABIv1 even if I didn't plan for it.

[wawa]

@deadwood

im fully aware of the differences and that you are not dedicated to abi v1. but right now i think the code might have moved too far apart to back port stuff from v1.

[deadwood]

@wawa

Hmm, I don't understand your last comment. I was not talking about again rebasing ABIv0 on top of trunk.