Re: [ros-dev] Time has come, a call to developers

[Daniel Reimer]

Aleksey Bragin schrieb:
>   	Hello,
>  this message is inspired by a lot of thinking, and yesterdays talk in  
>  #reactos, when Magnus Olsen's proposition to add support for more  
>  than one graphic adapter was a last drop into my cup of tolerancy.
>
>  Thus I want to say, one very important idea. But what I want even  
>  more, for our developers to understand it. The key idea is that our  
>  work on the project now MUST be aimed at bugfixing, not at adding  
>  even more nice features. There are already quite enough of them  
>  (features)!
>
>  As I said 1000 times, our general "users" don't care about ability to  
>  insert 3 graphic cards into their PC, and get ReactOS using them!  
>  They care about ReactOS crashing after closing regedit. Or during  
>  Office 2003 installation. And if it continues to crash this way, I'm  
>  sorry, but noone could feel the pleasure of multiple graphic cards  
>  support, or any other feature which is useless for 99% of potential  
>  users.
>
>  Moreover, I don't understand why noone ever bothered to work through  
>  the winetests for reactos-specific parts of the system, like GDI,  
>  user32/win32k testing, kernel32 testing. There are lots of failures,  
>  and wine test results show APIs which are used for REAL, and by REAL  
>  applications, not some historic APIs implemented by Magnus (no  
>  offence, I'm just using him as an example, please excuse me if I  
>  sound harsh anywhere) which are unused by any real application nowadays.
>
>  I clearly want to stress, that there is a strong misconcept in  
>  ReactOS way of development of its Win32 subsystem. There were a lot  
>  of positive events happening (win32k native tests library, great work  
>  by Timo at fixing various small issues, handles, memory leaks, etc).  
>  But it must be continued!
>
>  Ged Murphy said very right about the problem: small problems prevent  
>  big apps from working. Wine already supports Office 2003 for years,  
>  and noone except me was trying to make support it better. The same  
>  applies to everywhere, there is no need to have some special skills  
>  to improve ReactOS. You know, there are not that many people who  
>  *really* worked on win32k in Microsoft, and they obviously can't code  
>  for us anyway, so everyone had to learn how to develop one or another  
>  part of the system. Look at Stefan Ginsberg - a guy who didn't know  
>  anything about C development 3 months ago, but learnt just by reading  
>  ros-diffs (well, and constant private messaging me in IRC asking  
>  questions, but that doesn't count), and yesterday spotted a couple of  
>  important real problems.
>
>  Especially that counts for Win32-subsystem (the kernel must stay as  
>  strict NT-alike as legally possible, so it takes time to read all  
>  available literature), but for Win32-subsystem, just maintaining its  
>  code would result in a hundred less crashes now! I don't even say  
>  about rewriting bad written parts. Or just simply, very-very simply,  
>  syncing Wine's changes back into ReactOS!
>
>  But nobody cares to do that.
>
>  I especially delay the 0.3.5 release, because I want people to  
>  concentrate more on bugfixes. We could easily release in the  
>  beginning of may, there are enough of good changes for a usual  
>  reactos release. But I want this particular release to be *unusual*.
>
>  If ReactOS wants to hit beta this year, developers must concentrate  
>  on a boring work first, believe me, there will be lots more fun when  
>  amount of people trying out reactos increases at least 100x.
>
>  And if no beta this year, I'm sorry to say, but it may be too late.
>
>
>  Thanks for thorough reading. Comments are welcome.
>
>
>  With the best regards,
>  Aleksey Bragin.
>  _______________________________________________
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>  Ros-dev(a)reactos.org
>  http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
>
>
>     
I think concentrating to new Features is a good idea, but as long as 
ReactOS hangs on 2/3 of tries to install it, these should go into some 
branches. As long as ROS is unstable the main concentration should be in 
fixing the bugs which cause the instability. I more than second 
Aleksey's Mail. I got a mail from a guy some minutes ago which clearly 
shows, what ppl want and expect:

Are you a programmer on the ReactOS team? If yes, can you explain why Reactos can not be
run or installed? I keep reading use Vbox, also, is Reactos dos? The most important
question I have is, is the base stable and it's more about getting the apps made for
windows  working on ReactOS? 


I answered him with the same nice argument we all use all the time: Its 
Alpha etcetc blablabla.