Hello! In an effort to put ReactOS development into higher scales, I would like to announce that I am creating a global list of all possible development tasks, broken down into modules/sections/etc. By the time all tasks in this list are fully completed, ReactOS would result in transition to a beta-stage and bumping version number to >= 0.5 (so you understand how big this todolist will be).
This list would be a base to the global ReactOS Roadmap which is going to show a current status of reactos, expected times before future releases, and what future releases will contain exactly.
And the most important: It makes every programmer willing to participate in the project to find a task he feels familiar with, actually do it, and see how it advances the project. All the way before, the only really managed part of development was fixing bugs, because Bugzilla is storing all bugs descriptions/patches/ assignations/etc. Now, similar thing will come in help to the general development.
Creating such a list is quite a hard task, and it can't be done by an individual, so:
Attention all ReactOS Developers, please! Your word is very valuable here! Please, compile a list of tasks you think ReactOS needs and send it here as a reply to this message (I will put a preliminary draft of what I already compiled so far too somewhere in the wiki). Each task should be a clearly outlined work if possible, however all information is important so you can add something like "//TODO: Add more details about this task later" too.
Example of a task considered as "good" to me: - Boot manager -- Make Loader Parameter Block compatible with Windows XP one
Example of a less exact task, but which is still "good" - Boot manager -- Make boot process conforming to NTLDR boot process, so that FreeLdr can boot Windows without NTLDR.
Example of a "bad" task - NTOSKRNL -- Improve kernel
Thank you for the collaboration, I know this maybe a quite hard to do, but it's the first steps of an effort to get development to the speed and quality we never had before. Other things to mention are continuos integration system, regression testing frameworks, etc, etc.
With the best regards, Aleksey Bragin.