March Meeting Minutes

2010-03-31

20:30 UTC

Fezile IRC Server (fezile.reactos.org), #meeting

Participants

Present:

Giannis Adamopoulos

Johannes Anderwald

Javier Agustìn Fernàndez Arroyo

Maciej Białas

Aleksey Bragin

Colin Finck

Danny Götte

Ziliang Guo

Rafał Harabień

Kamil Hornicek

Amine Khaldi

Timo Kreuzer

Matthias Kupfer

Victor Martinez

Ged Murphy

Sylvain Petreolle

Hervé Poussineau

Daniel Reimer

Pierre Schweitzer

Samuel Serapion

Olaf Siejka

James Tabor

Art Yerkes

Proceedings

○ Meeting called to order at 20:30 UTC by Colin Finck

○ Point 1 in the agenda: ReactOS member definition

■ This point wasn’t easy to address, since there is no clear criteria to apply in order to define the team members. As a result, a discussion went on and ended up with an accepted proposal.

■ Colin Finck proposed that we skip a fixed definition of the term "ReactOS Member", but instead maintain a list with names employing the following rule: A person is added to this list if at least two existing ReactOS members propose him and the list maintainer (Colin Finck) or alternatively the backup list maintainer (Aleksey Bragin) agrees with their proposal.

■ The participants accepted Colin’s proposal.
(15 yes votes, 2 no votes, 3 abstained)

○ Point 2: Current ReactOS work

■ Aleksey: Currently working on ntdll/ldr and kernel32/ldr loaders, his next goal is undecided yet, he will look at what ReactOS needs more from user perspective.

■ Amine: Currently working on the CMake branch, the website revamp and the ideas around it.

■ Art: Currently working on fixing a few crashes running the regression test CD on the NewCC branch.

■ Colin: He has been busy with preparing the 0.3.13 release, then Chemnitz Linux Days, afterwards this meeting. He will be on a trip abroad starting 9th April and will return 13th May, he’s not yet sure what he will do then.

■ Daniel: He will continue to work on RosBE 1.6/2.0. Playing with the new GCC 4.6 right now. He also regularly works on forum moderation, translations and the rapps database.

■ Giannis: He has been working on fixing several bugs in win32k lately. This included multiple issues in ancient code related to handling desktops and window stations. He looks forward to apply for GSoC and work on theming support.

■ Matthias: He is occasionally working on small bugfixes for the ReactOS source tree. His main ReactOS work lies in leading the German foundation and preparing ReactOS appearances at events in Germany (passed Chemnitz Linux Days and upcoming LinuxTag in Berlin).

■ Maciej: Right now, he is investigating forum modules and extensions for Drupal, which could be handy for our users. This is part of the ongoing website revamp (point 6 in the meeting agenda).

■ Olaf: He has been working on our BuildBot, doing some cleanup work and setting up some builders for the NewCC branch and patches. He will handle the remaining issues like a need to backup the VBox test logs. When the new RosBE is out, he is going to try to make use of it within CMake build scripts. He has also been introducing the WIP (Work In Progress) tag in our Bugzilla and is going to push some more bugs marked with the PATCH tag to developers.

■ Pierre: For the moment, he is mainly cleaning up some parts of kernel32, focusing on the code inside the “file” subdirectory. This requires implementing the Mount Manager, which he is also doing. This may help to bring several improvements elsewhere in ReactOS. His work on FsRtl and especially the FsRtlIs*InExpression functions is also still going on. The current implementation will be superseded by a proper algorithm based on a NFA as soon as he has the time. He is moving to the CERN starting on 4th April, so his involvement in the project might change soon.

■ Samuel: He is already working on secur32, lsalib and schannel to refine his GSoC proposal.

■ Sylvain: He has been busy with various tasks related to the CMake branch, regression tests and bug fixing.

■ Timo: He is working on the GDI handle manager, better performance/scalability, better tracking of errors that could lead to deadlocks/leaks and minor interface improvements. Will take some time to get it right.

■ Victor: He is continuing working on PR aspects. He has just returned from another show in Huelva (Spain). Youtube videos will be available soon. He will also work on the website revamp and on improving the users forum experience, trying to create testing coordination. He is open to any suggestion regarding PR and attracting new users and developers.

■ Ziliang: Mostly doing GSoC preparation work at the moment. He is also preparing his own GSoC application concerning performance counters.

○ Point 3: Status of our GSoC participation, in particular students and mentors

■ Amine reported that we have got some student applications, but we still await more. As to mentors, so far we need Hervé and Kamil to register as mentors in the web platform, and we welcome more mentors and at least co-mentors to do the same. So far, we have Aleksey, Art, Ged, Pierre and Kamil as confirmed mentors. As to timeline, for student applications it is 8th April, and to get everything sorted out it is 22nd April.

○ Point 4: Upcoming LinuxTag event on 11th to 14th May 

■ Matthias reported that our project has been accepted this week for LinuxTag, so we would like to invite all ReactOS Team members to take part. He stated that he will be there the whole time if necessary, but he recommends that more members take part.

■ Victor expressed that he will be there from 11th to 13th.

■ Matthias thinks that we need at least 2 team members per day, and 3-4 team members overall. He also mentioned that, depending on the count of persons, we cannot pay all expenses for accommodation and transport.

■ Colin stressed out the fact that this is Europe's most-important event regarding Open-Source, and that it would not just be a good chance to present the project internationally, but also to get in touch with other ReactOS members.

○ Point 5: Sum up of previous events, ideas for next ones

■ Colin reported that we recently had the Chemnitz Linux Days event again. We presented ReactOS on 4 laptops there, two native and two in VMs. Compared to last year, ReactOS was now able for two major breakthroughs: One of the laptops running in a VM was capable of streaming internet radio all day long, while on the other hand, ReactOS was also able to run natively on a 4-year old system (with SATA controller!). The only caveat preventing the real usefulness of the native system was the lack of a working network driver for the Intel PRO/1000 PL chip. Having an improved network/driver stack would have made the presentation even better. He I assumes we had 50% interested people who already knew about ReactOS and wanted to hear about the updates in the last year, while the other half was completely new to ReactOS. Colin thinks we still have enough potential to make new people aware of the project and maybe even gain more developers. That was just said to understand why we are so eager about PR lately and have the next event in not much more than a month.

■ Victor reported that he has been holding 2 events lately. The major one is Imaginatica'11. We had a booth there and a showroom, and had a lot of visitors quite interested in ReactOS. Even more, we had 2 important visits from a company and CSIC (Spanish investigators) who asked if a Windows driver would work in ReactOS, because they are doing embedded systems. They also asked Victor if we would work on sponsored specific compatibility aspects, which means "if I pay you a certain amount for having OpenOffice and ContaPlus working, will you work on it ?". Victor suggested as a result that this "Compatibility On demand" concept is a possible market. He also was holding another speech in Huelva: "Jornadas Tecnlogicas". The best thing about this was that it is the first time an Event has contacted us to show ReactOS. As a result of the recent events, he noticed that we have to change our presentations style from the quite technical ones to the quite general ones, for a wider audience. He also reported that he was contacted by a new Spanish designer thanks to Imaginatica. This was a direct result of his emphasis on the fact that we don't just need developers, but also skilled members in the other departments, including designers, bloggers, testers, users, etc. Victor will see if this new designer has web design capabilities, in which case he may join our website revamp efforts.

○ Point 6: Website revamp. Current status, who is working, who is willing to help

■ Colin mentioned that we still want a complete revamp of our website, starting from scratch with the articles and also dropping RosCMS and basing everything around the Drupal CMS. He also mentioned that while the design winner from 2009 is still the target design, it needs to be adapted to Drupal now, not just due to the different technology behind Drupal, but also because our Drupal website should be more based on activity (as outlined in our website revamp google document)

■ A technical discussion has been held to try to analyze the needs and discuss how they will be addressed.

■ Victor is in contact with a Spanish designer, hopefully he can work with him on the design department.

■ Ziliang will be taking care of the content department.

■ Maciej will handle the technical aspects of the website revamp, he set up a testing server where we are going to test the Drupal 7-based website revamp. Moving this server to an officially hosted VM is planned.

■ Danny is handling the VM on the ReactOS server.

■ We agreed on working on these different departments in parallel.

○ Meeting ended at 23:57 UTC.

○ Minutes submitted by Amine Khaldi.