Thanks to “scottmc” over on BeGroovy for spotting this page on the Haiku website: R1/Alpha1Proposals. Various proposals were recently submitted and voted on, in an effort to determine the requirements that Haiku will need to meet (and bugs that will need to be fixed) before it will be considered ready for an Alpha release.

Some of the more interesting proposals that have been accepted:

- Release as the GCC 2/4 hybrid – meaning that “applications compiled with GCC 2 and 4 can run out of the box”
- Include Pe (as a long time Pe fan, who is using it to write this, that proposal gets a big thumbs-up from me)
- Finish and Include Swap File Support – sounds like that one is mostly taken care of already
- Include a special Haiku-only unlocked version of Wonderbrush – an excellent vector drawing app, which BeOSNews reviewed way back in ‘06 (one of these days, I might even fix the broken images, whoops)

While this doesn’t necessarily mean that R1 – or even Alpha 1 – is right around the corner, it is still extremely encouraging that the Haiku developers feel they are close enough to create a roadmap.