[ros-dev] Regressions / release status

[Aleksey Bragin]

Hello!

Time flies fast, and soon we are going to face the deadline (next status 
meeting) by which we decided to create a RC of the upcoming release. 
And, there are some problems.

I will start from good stuff. Since the last meeting took place, quite a 
few regressions were fixed, and interesting bugs have also been closed. 
This is very good and I appreciate your efforts.

However some problems remains, and here is where your help is urgently 
needed! For the current milestone (0.3.14), there are 3 blocker 
regressions and 2 big buckets of issues - ldr rewrite regressions and 
shell32 rewrite regressions.

 From blocker stuff, the most important is the heap-related one. 
Mephisto provided a good explanation here 
(http://www.reactos.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5857), and we need 
someone with a fresh eye to look into this problem. N.B. Please don't go 
into "let's fix some unrelated stuff in the heap code just to make it 
better". Look strictly into the specified bug and try to spot the place 
where the heap lists are getting corrupted.
Anyone volunteers to have a look?

LDR regressions: there are relatively many of them, but all are 
more-or-less nicely fixable because of the new, good LDR code. Alex - 
maybe you could please devote a bit of your time to check the code and 
see if that fixes some of the regressions?

shell32 regressions: I already see some improvements being committed, 
please continue this way.

We can make a good 0.3.14 release only if we act as a team now. It's not 
someone, it's YOUR help which matters. Testers are already doing as much 
as they can, retesting issues, providing newer debug logs, and other 
other things. Now it's time to act and fix regressions before moving 
further. It's just stupid to move further, if a rewrite introduces new 
bugs instead of fixing existing. I know how hard it is, but let's finish 
smaller steps and hence move forward.

There is no way forward at all if old bugs are stacked and new 
regressions are introduced all the time. We can't bring in new good 
changes (wine syncs, 3rd party code syncs, arwinss, whatever else) until 
0.3.14 is ready, and 0.3.14 is not ready until blocking regressions are 
fixed. As simple as it is.

Thanks for reading and I hope you understand.

With the best regards,
Aleksey Bragin.