But what is a bug ? And how should they be fixed ? What's the thing a so-called modern OS must have ? And how should they be implemented into the Amiga OS ?
Two years later, people were still arguing about this and not even one line of code had been written (or at least no one had ever seen that code). And discussions were still of the pattern "we must have..." and someone answered "read the old mails" or "this is impossible to do, because" which was shortly followed by "you're wrong because" and this one was ripped apart and so on.
In the winter of 1995, I (Aaron Digulla) was fed up with it and I posted an RFC (request for comments) to the AOS mailing list in which I asked what the minimal common ground might be. Several options were given and the conclusion was that almost everyone would like to see an OS which is compatible to OS 3.1 (Kickstart 40.68) on which further discussions could be based upon to see what is possible and what is not.
So the work began and AROS was born.
AROS' goal is it to create an OS which
To reach this goal, we use a number of techniques. First of all, we make heavy use of the Internet. You can participate in our project even if you can write only one single OS function. The most current version of the source is accessible 24h per day and patches can be merged into it at any time. A small database with open tasks prevents all developers from doing something twice.
This is the current developer list. Please note that the EMail addresses of all developers but the coordinator are missing. The reason for this is that we want to protect the developers from junk mail. If you have something to ask or say, contact the coordinator.
| Job | Count | Todo | In work | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| icon | 12 | 0.00% | 25.00% | 75.00% |
| iffparse | 40 | 0.00% | 0.00% | 100.00% |
| locale | 24 | 0.00% | 37.50% | 62.50% |
| graphics | 163 | 83.44% | 0.61% | 15.95% |
| utility | 38 | 5.26% | 28.95% | 65.79% |
| diskfont | 5 | 80.00% | 20.00% | 0.00% |
| intuition | 124 | 62.90% | 10.48% | 26.61% |
| exec | 118 | 2.54% | 5.93% | 91.53% |
| console | 2 | 50.00% | 0.00% | 50.00% |
| datatypes | 15 | 0.00% | 100.00% | 0.00% |
| dos | 154 | 48.70% | 0.00% | 51.30% |
There is a total of 37 other things. 16 (43.24%) are still todo. 13 (35.14%) are currently in work. 8 (21.62%) are completed.
A snapshot of the window of demowin
This window is opened with the demowin demo program. It opens a window and renders some graphics in it. You can click on the gadgets and the program will tell you which gadget has been pressed. If you press the gadget with the label "Complement", the sizes for the PropGadgets will change. You can press a key and the program will show you the string which is associated with that key. You can press the left, middle and right mousebutton to draw lines in the window. To exit the demo, press the Escape key or click on one of the "Exit" gadgets at the bottom.
This shows the output of readicon. In the big window, you can see debugging and informational output of the program. The small window shows the normal and selected state of an icon and contains a gadget which has the icons' images for its normal and selected images.
These are things which are still to do:
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at digulla@aros.fh-konstanz.de . 04 Feb 1997
