Re: [ros-dev] On the growth of the reactos project

[Maya Posch]

Interesting ideas, I can definitely see potential in them :)

Coincidentally, I began work on the ReactOS Synthesis project last year, 
with the intention of making a utility which would replace components in 
Windows with their ReactOS equivalents after they had been tested to be 
stable. While this project never got very far, I think that it could be 
revived as a combination of the original concept as well as the 
'distribution' concept.

Essentially it would aim to give stability to end-users, people who are 
more interested in just using an OS instead of testing it and praying it 
doesn't crash. This would be featured in stable releases, using only the 
best and most stable patches from the ReactOS trunk and branches. One'd 
also be able to 'upgrade' a Windows (XP SP3, most likely) installation 
with ReactOS components. The latter would be more experimental, the 
former more meant to give end-users an idea of what a stable ReactOS 
will be like.

I would also want to make the new installer (ROSE) part of the distribution.

Thoughts? Comments?


Maya

Samuel serapion さんは書きました:
>   Hello everyone. I find myself today thinking, as I
> sometimes do, about 
>  the ReactOS problem. How come we are trying to clone the biggest and 
>  arguably the most popular desktop OS in the world and still have such a 
>  small community/user base?
>  
>  The obvious answer to this question is that ros doesn’t do what it 
>  promises. Indeed it does almost run a lot of windows applications... 
>  some of the time, but that’s not the whole picture. Let us examine the 
>  typical(in my experience) first time encounter of a random computer user 
>  with reactos.
>  
>  <fanboy> Look, this is a free open source windows clone called ReactOS. 
>  It has solitaire and runs firefox. Awesome, isn’t it?
>  
>  <noob> so does it run my windows drivers and Office and COD4 and… !?
>  
>  <fanboy> well…. Umm…  not really.
>  
>  Let’s analyze what went wrong:
>  
>  /1)      /ReactOS base distribution is fine and great, I totally like my 
>  reactos with just a cmd window and dwnl.exe; but it’s not enough, except 
>  perhaps for  someone that’s *extremely* motivated to do /something/ 
>  interesting with ros.//
>  
>  The solution, host a reactos distribution. I think its been proven that 
>  the reactos community doesn’t want to host more 3^rd party code in the 
>  repository unless it’s absolutely necessary. But that doesn’t matter. We 
>  don’t need to build firefox, mono, or anything from source.  The Windows 
>  model of software distribution is binary. There doesn’t have to be an 
>  update manager, reactos is just a toy(more on that later) and it needs 
>  to look useful so that people buy into it. Maybe a nice list of packages 
>  and some checkboxes in second stage installed with a script…
>  
>   
>  
>  2)      Hardware support is very poor, on recent hardware it almost 
>  never works(wild guess 75% fail rate on modern hardware) Problems range 
>  from unsupported video cards/ros driver uses wrong/unsupported mode, 
>  wrong storage bus, random crashes from unsupported usb devices + pcmcia 
>  other  similar alien buses and just random bullshit. Even if nothing 
>  manages to bring down reactos, it of course has the wrong nic card and 
>  since usb storage doesn’t exist there’s no chance to get a driver and 
>  see ros crash because of course we only support a couple of drivers.
>  
>  I know this can’t just be magically fixed, but we need people dedicated 
>  to do hardware testing/debugging and provide real bug reports with 
>  traces. (Suggestion: allow kdbg to take ownership of the screen/give it 
>  back, provide visual console. I don’t care if it’s not a windows feature.)
>  
>  3)      Who cares about all the above? Not noobs, the question they 
>  really ask is: “Does it run XYZ?”
>  
>  What is XYZ? Flagship applications. The ones everyone knows and uses, 
>  commercial and opensource. The following, I think, are universally 
>  recognized as very important.
>  
>  a)      Firefox + Flash (this works most of the time… maybe god will 
>  kill that mouse move bug)
>  
>  b)      A recent version of Microsoft Office. (2007 would be very nice)
>  
>  c)       Latest OpenOffice( imagine a make distro command that would 
>  tell ros setup to install it automagically, wouldn’t that make testing 
>  easier… heck we could have a super build bot that wrote documents in 
>  office and compiled shit with gcc and took 3 days to run….)
>  
>  d)      .NET Framework (atleast 2.0) (This means fixing its installer bug)
>  
>  e)      Java runtime. (it installs and almost launches limewire!! Christ!!)
>  
>  f)       Visual Studio 2008 (installer fails, but the c++ compiler works 
>  and the IDE almost works!!)
>  
>  g)      Recent versions of Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver or Flash.
>  
>   
>  
>  Extra points:
>  
>  h)      Msn Messenger (its expected by windows users)
>  
>  i)        Internet Explorer (screenshots floated around at some point 
>  with IE6, I think.. or maybe it was a dream)
>  
>  j)        Virtual Box (with its drivers!) ( I just love the vm inside vm 
>  screenshot)
>  
>  k)      Nmap (only pcap driver is broken!)
>  
>  l)        Silverlight (seems to install)
>  
>  m)    Itunes (with ipod support)
>   
>  (please dont be pricks about this list, make a poll or something if you 
>  must, but someone has to arbitrarily set it)
>   
>  The sad truth is that most of these applications are known to work to a 
>  certain degree. However, good bug reports don’t even exist. I’m 
>  confident that with a bit of determined effort these apps can be made to 
>  work. Atleast we need to compile a list of whats missing in ros that is 
>  need to support these and other important applications with real bug 
>  reports, and focus the project... give defined tasks to noobs that 
>  stumble into the project but are not knowledgable enought to dive into 
>  our huge code base and decide what are the missing features/features 
>  that need work/bugs.
>  But really, what is the point of this email…
>  
>  0.4.0 will be a milestone release(nice round number), people really want 
>  these and other similar applications to work(perhaps they are the 
>  reasons people still use windows). It makes sense to try and support 
>  them and would provide a nice PR boost if 0.4.0 can honestly be said to 
>  support any or all of the above applications.
>  
>  ReactOS is a developer toy, a cute little model of windows that almost 
>  works. If we can at least make it work for applications that most users 
>  actually use we could maybe, oh I don’t know… spark some interest. Yes, 
>  it’s about users, which we still won’t condone being alpha and all. But 
>  users are the ones that get excited and twitter and facebook and blog 
>  about the little OS that could; Excitement that will get developers 
>  exited, that will provide testers (I’m praying for some sort of reactos 
>  error reporting service, atleast a minidump….. atleast in usermode… 
>  support event logs…. for Christ sakes our bug reports suck and they 
>  suck10x worse when they come from noobs!).
>  
>  Right now we are stuck in the vm, so atleast make that experience 
>  enjoyable. There’s no need to rant about explorer, I hope…
>  
>  We have to start thinking about 0.5 and making reactos “beta”, and I 
>  still haven’t seen plans on how that’s going to happen or what exactly 
>  that means. ReactOS development needs to speed up and get more 
>  organized….. that’s all I have to say about that…. probably not…
>  
>  
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