[ros-dev] What I have learned on my time off (LinuxWorld)

[Steven Edwards]

Hi Everyone,
We got very good feedback from LinuxWorld.de and I will be returning
next year. 90% of the people visting our booth left thinking very
highly of our work. All in all the results were much better than the
last expo. I very surprised that so many people came up to us and said
"we have heard of ReactOS or we have tried it out".

Here is my rough list of notes on where I think we need to go from here
after discussion with the developers and users.

1. We need a roadmap for the future. 

THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THERE ARE FIRM DATES ATTACHED!!!!

But we do need to plan our 0.3, 0.4, 0.5 and 1.0 releases. During a
dinner discussion with some of the dev team I asked the question "What
do we need before we can have a ReactOS Workstation 1.0" and it does
not seem to be to far out of grasp. Dont get me wrong there are LOTS of
little things that must be done but the major things we need to have a
real replacement workstation are below. If you think about what Windows
NT 4 had even with Service Pack 6 we are not that far off. Note I am
not  talking about a server replacement here. Just a usable client OS.

 - Networking (0.3)
 - Samba port needs to implemented (0.4)
 - We need to implement Windows style printing support (0.4 or 0.5)
 - Most applications need to install..Office 2000/XP, Quicken, etc
(0.4)
 - We have to develop our own Hardware Compatibity List (0.5)
 - NTFS (????)
 - It must be stable (1.0)

2. We have to have regression testing in place.

Lack of stablity and regressions are killing us. We have to have the
Wine tests in ReactOS. We also need a suite of kernel mode tests.
Casper's system seems like its going to work well for the kernel mode
side but most of us seem to be worried about the lack of being able to
use Winehq regression tests for user mode.

3. We need to improve our documentation and website.

After much discussion and two too many beers on my part our discussions
turned to documentation and the website. We all agreed that the current
system is not working and we need to develop a method of storing most
of the website in CVS so that people can send us a patch. Same thing
with the documentation....none of us wants to use ezPublish to develop
documentation when we can all use docbook right out of cvs and submit
diffs. Most of us even like the Wiki system as its not hassle and can
maintain a history as well.

4. We need to develop relationships with vendors. 

This ties in to getting ReactOS stable and usable. Once we have 0.3 out
the door I expect things will change for us in ways no one can see. I
am going to focus more on this in the coming months, first in the way
of hardware donations.

5. Moving to subversion.
There still seems to be some problems with this and while we all seem
to look forward to it, CVS is doing its job for the moment. GvG has
offered to setup a CVS mirror to help with some of the bandwith
problems of mok.

In closing it was very cool to get to meet all of the developers that
were able to make it, I feel like we are going in the right direction
and I look forward to your feedback.

Thanks
Steven



		
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