15 May
2009
15 May
'09
11:33 p.m.
The analogy between comparing a Linux distro and ROS doesn't work, since the
components within ROS are interdependent pretty much by design. One isn't
supposed to be developing them independently of each other. The only major
component that can get away with it, specifically some of the user mode DLLs
for win32, are already being done by Wine, not us. All those DLLs come from
Wine and we only occasionally modify them to fix a bug or an
incompatibility.
I'm getting the impression that people are confused as to what exactly the
ROS team develops. The team works on essentially the kernel mode side of
things, which includes the kernel side of the Win32 subsystem, and the NT
kernel itself, along with the basic drivers one needs to get going. On the
user mode side, we also need to do all the stuff that acts as the interface
between kernel and user mode. This can't be split as some kind of third
party effort, as it's tied in too directly to the kernel design. Would be
pretty much pointless since no one else would have a use for it and we would
need to guarantee compatibility between the two anyway.
The majority of user mode applications are all third party. Paint and Calc
were done by people that frequent the ROS forum while the rest I'm pretty
sure are from Wine. A lot of the user mode DLLs are also from Wine, as I
mentioned above, and Wine is doing their own stuff development wise.
The only thing that I can think of which could legitimately be split off
would be the explorer shell, but it literally is of no use to anyone except
us, since it's essentially duplicating the old Windows 2000 style. It's not
radical or experimental or whatever, it is just a clone of the interface.
Quite frankly, there really aren't many ways to actually split ROS. The
major components all are tied to each other and the smaller/other stuff
either are already completely third party or were done because no one else
out there was interested in it but we needed it.