

Interview with Haiku developer Paweł Dziepak - izietto
https://www.haiku-os.org/news/2014-05-10_extensive_interview_haiku_developer_pawe%C5%82_dziepak

======
girvo
Ah Haiku, my true OS love. How I miss you (and wish I could use you for
production work). One of these days I'll get back into your warm, nostalgic
embrace once more.

Are there many here that were BeOS lovers? I'm too young for that,
unfortunately, but found Haiku when it was alpha 3, and have fond memories of
playing with it for months. Having a true desktop operating system with a
great architecture and quite an amazing SDK... now I use OS X and elementary
OS, but I still fire up a VM now and then.

In the interview, he talks about attributes, which are basically meta-data at
the file-system level. Such an amazing but simple idea, that works wonders.
Having a mail client that literally works with files on the file-system is
quite a different experience!

~~~
rayiner
> Are there many here that were BeOS lovers?

I used it on the desktop for about six months to a year (1999? 2000?). R4.5.
Switched away when they sold to Palm.

I still have a copy of Giampalo's "Practical Filesystem Design" somewhere in
the house. It looks like he's published it online:
[http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-
design.pdf](http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf).

I remember at the time being upset that Apple had gone with NeXT instead of
BeOS
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History)),
but in retrospect it was obviously the right call, even from a technical point
of view. It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the
time, but now fits in a phone...

PS: Does anyone know if Be's developer notes/articles are archived anywhere? I
remember there being some really great articles from the OS developers about
stuff like how the app_server worked, etc.

EDIT: Ah yes, the Be Newsletters: [http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html](http://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-
docs/benewsletter/index.html). These are fricking great. I strongly recommend
reading them for anyone interested in OS internals.

~~~
protomyth
"It's really crazy that OS X 10.0 was such a pig on the systems of the time"

I was so ticked because OpenStep and NeXTSTEP were so responsive and I
couldn't figure out what the people at Apple had done to it. Plus, changing
how the menu[1] worked and moving the vertical scrollbar were and are grave
sins as far as I'm concerned.

1) The UI rule that is used to justify using the Mac menu bar doesn't make any
sense for touch, big monitors, or multi-monitors.

~~~
CocaKoala
Isn't the Mac menu bar designed to keep Fitts' law in mind? I can see how that
isn't relevant for touch, but why does it not apply for big monitors or
multiple monitors?

~~~
protomyth
leave what I'm working on -> scroll -> scroll -> scroll -> click menu -> run
mouse back to window via a lot of scrolling

NeXTSTEP had nice menu that could be detached - it was so easy

~~~
wtallis
That's not what "scrolling" generally means. And if your cursor has a decent
acceleration curve applied to it, the potentially long distance to the menu
won't matter unless the menu is at least one large monitor away.

~~~
protomyth
and what word would you use?

well, its a tad bit longer than the NeXTSTEP menu near the window and OS X
doesn't allow tear-offs. I find it irritating and stupid compared to what NeXT
had. There are quite a few things they dropped in the conversion from NeXTSTEP
/ OpenStep to OS X that I miss.

------
frik
BeOS with its database-like BFS filesystem
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeFS) ) were
forerunners for its time. The BFS developer Dominic Giampaolo was later
responsible for Apple's Spotlight desktop search in OSX 10.4 and iOS:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_\(software\))

Similar to Bill Gates vision of _Information at Your Fingertips_ with the
later Microsoft's _Cairo_ project and even later _WinFS_ (both vamporware)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_operating_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_operating_system),
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS)

Microsoft's NTFS and especially its newer ReFS
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS) ) are
conceptually similar to BFS. The missing piece is a layer above the kernel
driver that would have been _WinFS_ \- a shell integration and search API.

~~~
gecko
I might grant that NTFS is conceptually similar to BFS (though its alternate
data streams lack types, IIRC; been awhile since I dove into that). I am
optimistic that the new commandlets introduced in PowerShell 3, along with
better tooling, might mean that Windows 9 starts using them more heavily, much
like OS X ~10.7 started to.

But I don't agree ReFS is in the same boat. ReFS, at least as it exists today,
has more in common with Plan 9's Fossil/Venti than anything else. Most
notably, it explicitly doesn't support alternate streams, which is the exact
piece of NTFS that is most like BFS, nor does it support extended attributes
(the vestigial HPFS-era predecessor to alternate data streams). Given that it
also lacks things like hard links, file system transactions (N.B., this is
database-like transactions for a collection of file system operations, not
traditional file system journaling), and a bunch of other things that I
associate with BFS-like everything-is-a-database file systems, I don't think
that comparison is apt.

~~~
frik

      Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 add additional
      features when using ReFS, including alternate data 
      streams [...]
    

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS)
(bottom) and [http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/hh831724.aspx](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/hh831724.aspx)

ReFS features are still evolving and like NTFS is designed to be extendable
(as has happened with NTFS).

It is of course NTFS that was involved in all the history of WinNT, Cairo and
WinFS and still is the major FS. (I just mentioned ReFS for completeness)

Neither NTFS ADS nor Apple'S Resource fork and HFS+ ADS are something new:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_streams_.28...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Alternate_data_streams_.28ADS.29),
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(file_system)#Apple](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_\(file_system\)#Apple)
and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork)

And neither the Explorer shell nor OSX Finder expose it as GUI - what a shame.

dotNet API's lags behind WinAPI, so dotNet/PowerShell just catches up a bit -
nothing special.

Windows 9 will be interesting indeed. But I have my doubts... given that Win
Vista had the advanced search dialog in Explorer shell. The newer Win 7 had no
such dialog and generally the whole metadata idea was buried away in the
slightly changed UI (removed list-group bar, changed metadata bar, folder
doesn't remember state, custom added columns not saved, etc.) Even the great
"Photo gallery" application has a optional download as part of their LIVE apps
and Media player hides the playlist with its star-rating by default, etc. I
don't comment Win 8.x.

~~~
gecko
I didn't realize that ReFS in Win 8.1 had had a meaningful revision, but
that's great to hear. And I wasn't saying that ADS or HFS+ ADS were new, but
rather that they're barely used, and that the relative increase in usage in
recent editions of OS X indicates a comparative uptick. I don't honestly know
any common use of ADS on NTFS, although I think that the AppleShare
implementation on WinNT 4 used them to preserve Mac OS resource forks, but I
haven't looked too hard, either.

I disagree with you blowing off the significance of ADS support showing up in
PowerShell. You could already access ADS in .NET, but PowerShell it's
interesting to see native cmdlets in PowerShell for working with ADS because
_it 's the shell_. To me, this indicates that Microsoft is anticipating
developers will want to directly work with ADS from PowerShell, and that is
interesting to me.

~~~
frik
Can you give me a link related to the OSX "relative increase in usage in
recent editions"? Has Finder gained some new features or are there new
applications that take advantage of ADS/resource fork? I like to read up more
and learn more about this.

OSX Finder "information window" with its metadata feature stayed almost the
same since OSX 10.4 Tiger which also marked the introduction of Spotlight
desktop search.

The command line shell of WinNT, the Win32 console implementation is a bit
complex
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32_console](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32_console)
). Win 7+ ships with at least 3 _shells_ : cmd.exe and PowerShell as well as
the GUI shell explorer.exe (+ shell32.dll).

ADS (called Zone.Identifier) are added by Internet Explorer and recently by
other browsers to mark files downloaded from external sites as possibly unsafe
to run.

~~~
gecko
OS X uses HFS+ resource forks for a variety of things, beginning around 10.4.
Prior to Mavericks, they were used to handle ACLs, to track Time Machine
metadata, to track whether a file was downloaded or native to the file system
(which in turn shows up as a Finder warning when launching applications you
downloaded from the Internet) and where it was downloaded from, and some other
minor things. Beginning with Mavericks, they were also used to support giving
files arbitrary tags, which is what I had in mind. You can read more about the
implementation at
[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/9/](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/9/)
.

Notably, while all of the above use resource forks, they're not exposed to the
user directly as resource forks, but rather as additional Finder widgets and
behaviors.

~~~
frik
System wide metadata and tag support is great. Sadly, both Win and Mac are
lacking in this discipline.

It's ironic that Windows XP exposed the ADS in the file property dialog
"summary" tab:
[http://www.infosecwriters.com/texts.php?op=display&id=53](http://www.infosecwriters.com/texts.php?op=display&id=53)

Vista onwards one can only view (also in XP) and edit metadata for supported
file formats like jpg, doc, docx, mp3, etc. Such formats have its own metadata
format like ID3 for mp3 and EXIF/IPTC/XMP for jpeg that explorer.exe and
windows media player support.

OSX uses ADS or sidecar files (on FAT/NTFS/network) but only supports 7 colors
that can be mapped to tags (mean on every PC different things; similar to MS
Outlook tags).
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file)

Seeing the OSX sidecar files is really annoying (beginning with a dot and have
otherwise the same name as the original file) on Windows. (a bit similar to
the thumbs.db) The same goes for WinNT6+ that creates multi GB preview cache-
database files in the users directory instead of one "thumbs.db" per directory
- ultra annoying :(

It would be great, if Microsoft and Apple could agree on a new metadata
sidecar standard (like XMP from Adobe, now ISO standard:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform)
).

 _My proposal:_ One zip file containing all XMP metadata sidecar files and
file preview pictures of the current directory.

------
baldfat
Haiku OS developer is 22!!!! I loved BeOS and had such high hopes for it. Once
again superior technology losses to Apple and Microsoft.

Amazing Technology that loss (By pain factor.

1) Amiga (1985- ?) (It was light year ahead of everyone especially Apple
(Toaster anyone) Drama from Commodore CEO was the cause of death.

2) BeOS (1992-2001) BeOS was to be OSX but Apple refused to pay more then $125
mill and BeOS wanted $200 mill.

3) Dvorak keyboard (1936) lost to QWERTY which was designed so poorly to slow
down people's typing so that mechanical typewriters wouldn't jam. Dvorak
keyboard was designed for typing speed.

~~~
ebiester
1\. While the Amiga was ahead of Apple in some ways, there was a reason people
bought the Macintosh. It was a better user experience for most people.

2\. NeXT would have been considered the "Fantastic technology that was never
appreciated" if everyone would have went with BeOS. And do you really think
that the Be experience would have been the one that survived to OSX?

3\. QWERTY being designed to slow people down is a myth long since debunked.
Further, as i understand it, Colemak is the way to go today. Why is everyone
sticking with Dvorak? :)

~~~
collyw
Does querty not make a bit of sense again, with the advent of touchscreens? If
it was designed to minimize key jams, then I would assume that it leads to
less ambiguity in what words are being typed.

(And the Amiga was a far superior experience to a Mac. It had colour for
starters. )

~~~
ebiester
QWERTY doesn't really make sense from today's standpoint -- however, most of
us still use it because switching costs are high. (I think about switching
every once in a while...)

But however much I prefered the Amiga due to my love for Commodore and the
technical advantages, the Macintosh has a friendlier design.

------
jahitr
BeOS was great.

All the hard work put on the icons and the GUI. It was truly remarkable.

If i'm not mistaken, I compiled my first C program on that OS.

Reading the SDK documentation was also a great source of ideas for a newbie in
C++. I remember that the idea of flattenable objects blow my mind :D

To this day I still wonder why it hasn't gained more adoption.

Mad respect at all those folks working on Haiku!

------
batmansbelt
Just tried out the virtual machine. Seems pretty slick! It's a very fast OS,
just like I remember BeOS being back in 1998. Still suffers the same problem
that I have no real reason to use it.

------
ginko
I remember that one of BeOS's primary shortcomings compared to current
mainstream systems is that it's essentially single-user.

Has this been tackled in Haiku?

~~~
girvo
No, still single user. Though as a straight desktop system that's never really
worried me personally... I do remember someone saying they had begun tackling
it, but I could be making that up.

~~~
gecko
I don't think anyone's really begun tackling it. There's widespread agreement
that Haiku should eventually support it, but I don't know that anyone's done
any effort to really move in that direction (with one pseudo-exception: Haiku
does a better job than BeOS properly arranging the file system into user-
specific v. machine-specific folders, which will help when they get there).

