SoylentNews

Haiku OS Releases R1 Beta 1

posted by martyb on Sunday September 30 2018, @07:27AM   
from the the-nightly-images-are-good-too dept.

Subsentient writes:

After nearly 6 years since R1/alpha4, Haiku R1/beta1 has been released.

[...] This release sees the addition of official x86_64 images, alongside the existing x86 32-bit ones.

[...] By far the largest change in this release is the addition of a complete package management system.

I'm very happy to see the progress alternative open source operating systems have made in recent years.

[Haiku -- an OS,
development continues,
open source is good.
Try your own --Ed.]

---

Original Submission

• Haiku’s package management system is unique in ... Haiku’s package management system is unique in ... (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @12:48AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @12:48AM (#742188)

  Haiku’s package management system is unique in a variety of ways. Rather than keeping a database of installed files with a set of tools to manage them, Haiku packages are a special type of compressed filesystem image, which is ‘mounted’ upon installation (and thereafter on each boot) by the packagefs, a kernel component.

  This means that the /system/ hierarchy is now read-only, since it is merely an amalgamation of the presently installed packages at the system level (and the same is true for the ~/config/ hierarchy, which contains all the packages installed at the user level), ensuring that the system files themselves are incorruptible.

  Since packages are merely “activated”, not installed, this means that the bootloader has been given some capacity to affect them: you can now boot into a previous package state (in case you took a bad update) or even blacklist individual files. (Blacklists can be made permanent through a settings file.)

  And of course, since the disk transactions for managing packages are limited to moving them between directories and in and out of the “activated packages” listing file, installations and uninstallations are practically instant. You can thus also manage the installed package set on a non-running Haiku system by mounting its boot disk and then manipulating the /system/packages directory and associated configuration files.

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+5
  Interesting=3, Informative=2, Total=5
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		5

• Re:Haiku’s package management system is unique in (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @10:07AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 01 2018, @10:07AM (#742273)

  ensuring that the system files themselves are incorruptible.

  As far as I can tell, it just means that in order to to corrupt the system files, you have to corrupt the corresponding package files.

  Parent