27 May
2011
27 May
'11
4:43 p.m.
May Meeting Minutes
2011-05-26
20:05 UTC
Freenode, #reactos-meeting
Participants
=============
- Aleksey Bragin
- Art Yerkes
- Cameron Gutman
- Claudiu Mihail
- Colin Finck
- Gabriel Ilardi
- Ged Murphy
- Giannis Adamopoulos
- James Tabor
- Jan Blomqvist Kinander
- Javier Agustìn Fernàndez Arroyo
- Johannes Anderwald
- Kamil Hornicek
- Maciej Bialas
- Matthias Kupfer
- Neeraj Yadav
- Olaf Siejka
- Pierre Schweitzer
- Rafal Harabien
- Samuel Serapion
- Sylvain Petreolle
- Thomas Faber
- Timo Kreuzer
- Victor Martinez
- Ziliang Guo
Proceedings
============
○ Meeting called to order at 20:05 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.
○ Point 1: Status of our GSoC participation
--------------------------------------------
■ ReactOS' GSoC administrator Ged Murphy gave a quick update about
individual participants:
- Timo Kreuzer is way ahead of the timeline and already has his
font driver working under Windows. He later showed these
screenshots:
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/156/ftfd.png/
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/5/roxxc.png/
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/220/wtfishappening.png/
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/199/ie1d.png/
The major remaining work is implementing the appropriate interface
to make the font driver usable under ReactOS.
- Giannis Adamopoulos is also progressing well and has already
committed a lot of code regarding theming. He later showed these
screenshots:
* http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/8500/theme2.png
* http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9660/theme3v.png
* http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7425/theme1c.jpg
- Thomas Faber, who works on the kernel-mode test suite, has been
pretty quiet so far, but is considered a trustworthy person who
knows what he is doing and does not need much help from the
community.
- Claudiu Mihail is considered a great student who is always
available on IRC and often asking questions. His lwIP driver is
progressing well, although he agrees that there is still much
work left.
- Andrew Green has taken the task to complete our new Explorer, but
there were a few issues with what he thought he was doing and what
we wanted from him. He assumed he had to work on the explorer_new
application itself while we actually need work done on related
components like shell32 and browseui. Ged thinks he might have
underestimated the workload a little, so some help from the
community might be required. This is also why Ged has begun to
work on shell32 himself and merge the latest changes with the C++
code by Andrew Hill.
Ged explicitly asks for more developers to join these efforts.
It would be great if these people had experiences with COM,
although this could also be a nice task for developers who want
to learn a bit about COM.
○ Point 2 (added): Neeraj Yadav's participation in GSoC
--------------------------------------------------------
■ Ged Murphy gave a quick background on what happened regarding Neeraj
Yadav, who was meant to work on the Audio Mixer project:
- After Google announced the project, Neeraj Yadav disappeared for
4 weeks and was not reachable by E-Mail or IRC.
- Ged has spoken to Carol Smith from Google afterwards, who
mentioned that some students waited for the first payment and then
fled.
- After a lot of discussion, it was necessary to inform Google that
we had lost a student.
- Ged has written some very apologetic mails to Google afterwards,
and they were pretty understanding.
- He has especially emphasized that this was a very bad time for us
and made the project looking incompetent. Apart from him, Amine
Khaldi and Johannes Anderwald (his mentor) were very angry about
this as well.
- Two days after these mails, Neeraj Yadav reappeared on IRC.
■ Neeraj Yadav said he was really sorry about his mistake, but also
explained his actions:
- He mentioned that his case was actually the opposite of what
Google might assume: While some students keep in contact with the
organisation until they get their first payment, he actually
disappeared during the community bonding period, but was available
again on the first day when coding started.
- His sudden absence occurred, because he needed to move to his
brother who lives in a remote place with no internet connectivity.
■ Ged again emphasized that a wrong decision on this can affect our
further participation in Google's Summer of Code project.
■ After a long discussion, it was decided that this matter requires a
private conversation between Johannes Anderwald and Ged Murphy and a
final decision needs to be taken by them.
Please note that this is a very shortened version of the discussion and
you should not build an opinion about the issue just from this information.
○ Point 3 (added): Changes in the meeting organisation
-------------------------------------------------------
■ Victor Martinez proposed to create a list of E-Mail addresses of
ReactOS Members, who are then informed one week before the meeting takes
place.
- This idea was immediately rejected by Aleksey Bragin and Samuel
Serapion, because we have the ros-dev mailing list for this.
- Victor Martinez then proposed that someone at least sends a mail
to ros-dev one week in advance. Colin Finck, Gabriel Ilardi, Jan
Blomqvist Kinander and Pierre Schweitzer agreed to this.
- Colin Finck proposed that Aleksey Bragin could take this job.
Aleksey Bragin agreed.
■ Jan Blomqvist Kinander asked whether we could already begin at 19:00
UTC. This required a voting between all participants (excluding the
people who only came to us through GSoC). As Colin Finck has not fixed
the IRC server with voting capabilities yet, the voters were publicly
asked about their opinion. Result:
- 17 positive votes
- 1 abstention
- 0 negative votes
The remaining participants were not available and did not vote. Even
without them, this result shows that we have a clear simple majority, so
further meetings will begin at 19:00 UTC.
○ Point 4: Current ReactOS work, Developers reporting their status
-------------------------------------------------------------------
■ Aleksey Bragin had a busy month, which began by giving a technical
lecture about ReactOS at Prague's technical university in the faculty of
informatics. It was received quite well with enough of interesting
questions. Afterwards, he moved to Berlin to join Matthias at our
LinuxTag booth. He describes the event as a very crowded and well
advertised one. On top of this, the ReactOS booth was located quite
close to the entrance, so we received a lot of visitors. Despite
LinuxTag being Europe's biggest Open-Source event, 99% of the incoming
people were German, so Matthias had to handle most of them.
Regarding ReactOS development, Aleksey is still working on his LDR
rewrite and fixed a few of the blocker bugs. There is still one serious
problem left until he can commit the rewrite to Trunk and gradually
improve it there, which should be done much faster. When this is done
and there are no new regressions left, he wants to perform a full Wine sync.
■ Art Yerkes has spent most time working on DWARF symbols. He made slow
progress towards reading the arguments off the stack as described by the
DWARF debug information. After Colin Finck asked, he also reported about
NewCC being in the same state as before, namely still requiring
performance improvements and regression testing until it can be merged
back to Trunk.
■ Cameron Gutman has been doing work on the PnP manager involving hot
swapping devices (like implementing device ejection, surprise removal,
etc.). He is almost done with his implementation of
IoRequestDeviceEject. The code is currently unused, but the USB work
might be a good testcase for it.
■ Colin Finck has returned to Germany two weeks ago and has been busy
with (mostly routine) foundation and server work. He is also relocating
in August, so he might be missing time for ReactOS work afterwards. For
now, his list basically inclues three ReactOS-related points:
- Fixing the bug in the IRC server we used for the March meeting
- Starting work on "RosBE 2.0" (certainly together with dreimer),
which also includes establishing fixed build tool versions for the
big CMake rollout
- Helping with the big website revamp
■ Gabriel Ilardi is quite busy lately, so he is mainly following the
forum and contributed some bitmaps for logonui.
■ Giannis Adamopoulos is exclusively working on the Theming task for GSoC.
■ Ged Murphy as our GSoC administrator has been pretty busy with related
work. However, he has recently started to work on the conversion of
shell32 to C++ and just finished merging back all changes from the C
version. He especially wants to thank Andrew Hill for his first work on
the C++ version and in particular his ATL headers, which give us a true
OO COM implementation. Additionally, he has started work on a logonui
module, but this is just a fun project for now. Finally, he has a
partially working NTFS driver, but this project is currently put on hold.
■ James Tabor is researching bug reports and building a list of related
issues and problems in the server-side window procedures. As we
currently do not have a functional screensaver, he is also trying to fix
this.
■ Jan Blomqvist Kinander is planning a new burglar-proof server bunker
fire cell at his workplace and will move our Fezile server (currently
hosting Doxygen and ISO Storage) there. He is also planning to make room
for a LAN behind the Fezile server, which we could use for automatic
tests on real hardware.
■ Johannes Anderwald is teaming with Michael Martin to develop the USB
stack. The current goal is to bring a working USB mass storage stack to
ReactOS. From this perspective, the goal is already reached for USB 2.0.
Today, he also got OHCI 1.1 mass storage support working and added some
fixes for keyboard/mice support in the USBOHCI driver. This still
requires proper HID support in a higher class driver though. The next
goals probably include UHCI support and synchronizing the work with
Cameron's PnP fixes and Pierre's Mount Manager work.
■ Kamil Hornicek has been arranging Aleksey's speech in Prague, but did
not have time for other ReactOS-related work. If anybody has an
interesting side project, he is willing to find some spare time for it
though.
■ Maciej Bialas hopes to get back to working on our new website in the
next one or two weeks. He has lately been setting up a local Bugzilla
and evaluated its authentication capabilities when combined with Drupal CMS.
■ Matthias Kupfer has been attending our LinuxTag booth for all three
days and is now working on a lot of "end-user-visible" parts in his
spare time. Since LinuxTag, he has started with the internationalization
of registry entries and small changes like adding the progress bar back
to FreeLdr. Besides, he also does routine work for the German ReactOS
foundation.
■ Olaf Siejka has been working on testing and pushing patches (as
reported by Gabriel Ilardi). He also reported that the CMake/MSVC builds
are now compiled from Trunk, but he needs to reinstall his Buildslave
with Windows 7 SP1 and thinks about buying a fast SSD for it. Finally,
he is in the middle of converting Polish resources to UTF-8 and perform
some cleanup and style corrections in the process.
■ Rafal Harabien has been busy with real life issues lately, but plans
to fix our cursors implementation in Win32k soon and clipboards afterwards.
■ Samuel Serapion is writing code for NTLM authentication stuff and will
move to the MSV1_0 and LSA modules afterwards. He referred to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa378753%28v=vs.85%29.aspx for
explanations about what these modules are used for.
■ Timo Kreuzer is exclusively working on the FreeType font driver for GSoC.
■ Victor Martinez has been presenting ReactOS at small Spanish
conferences about Open-Source in Seville and Huelva (again) before he
joined Aleksey and Matthias at LinuxTag in Berlin. Lately, he has been
modifying the Testing Central Wiki page, where the GoldenApps now point
to the Compatibility Database. Finally, he plans to establish a real
Testing Team (mainly from Forum users) together with Olaf.
■ Ziliang Guo has been working on several things like building and
verifying the drivers which are going to be signed with the ReactOS
Foundation certificate. He is also testing out a new MSI installer for
RosBE-Windows. His work towards the website overhaul is currently on
hold, because he first needs to install some more modules.
○ Meeting closed at 22:36 UTC by Colin Finck on behalf of Aleksey Bragin.
○ Minutes written by Colin Finck.
