May Meeting Minutes - Ros-dev

27 May 2011

May Meeting Minutes

2011-05-26
20:05 UTC
Freenode, #reactos-meeting

Participants
=============
- Aleksey Bragin
- Art Yerkes
- Cameron Gutman
- Claudiu Mihail
- Colin Finck
- Gabriel Ilardi
- Ged Murphy
- Giannis Adamopoulos
- James Tabor
- Jan Blomqvist Kinander
- Javier Agustìn Fernàndez Arroyo
- Johannes Anderwald
- Kamil Hornicek
- Maciej Bialas
- Matthias Kupfer
- Neeraj Yadav
- Olaf Siejka
- Pierre Schweitzer
- Rafal Harabien
- Samuel Serapion
- Sylvain Petreolle
- Thomas Faber
- Timo Kreuzer
- Victor Martinez
- Ziliang Guo

Proceedings
============
○ Meeting called to order at 20:05 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.

○ Point 1: Status of our GSoC participation
--------------------------------------------
■ ReactOS' GSoC administrator Ged Murphy gave a quick update about 
individual participants:
    - Timo Kreuzer is way ahead of the timeline and already has his
      font driver working under Windows. He later showed these
      screenshots:
         * http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/156/ftfd.png/
         * http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/5/roxxc.png/
         * http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/220/wtfishappening.png/
         * http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/199/ie1d.png/

      The major remaining work is implementing the appropriate interface
      to make the font driver usable under ReactOS.

    - Giannis Adamopoulos is also progressing well and has already
      committed a lot of code regarding theming. He later showed these
      screenshots:
         * http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/8500/theme2.png
         * http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9660/theme3v.png
         * http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7425/theme1c.jpg

    - Thomas Faber, who works on the kernel-mode test suite, has been
      pretty quiet so far, but is considered a trustworthy person who
      knows what he is doing and does not need much help from the
      community.

    - Claudiu Mihail is considered a great student who is always
      available on IRC and often asking questions. His lwIP driver is
      progressing well, although he agrees that there is still much
      work left.

    - Andrew Green has taken the task to complete our new Explorer, but
      there were a few issues with what he thought he was doing and what
      we wanted from him. He assumed he had to work on the explorer_new
      application itself while we actually need work done on related
      components like shell32 and browseui. Ged thinks he might have
      underestimated the workload a little, so some help from the
      community might be required. This is also why Ged has begun to
      work on shell32 himself and merge the latest changes with the C++
      code by Andrew Hill.

      Ged explicitly asks for more developers to join these efforts.
      It would be great if these people had experiences with COM,
      although this could also be a nice task for developers who want
      to learn a bit about COM.

○ Point 2 (added): Neeraj Yadav's participation in GSoC
--------------------------------------------------------
■ Ged Murphy gave a quick background on what happened regarding Neeraj 
Yadav, who was meant to work on the Audio Mixer project:
    - After Google announced the project, Neeraj Yadav disappeared for
      4 weeks and was not reachable by E-Mail or IRC.
    - Ged has spoken to Carol Smith from Google afterwards, who
      mentioned that some students waited for the first payment and then
      fled.
    - After a lot of discussion, it was necessary to inform Google that
      we had lost a student.
    - Ged has written some very apologetic mails to Google afterwards,
      and they were pretty understanding.
    - He has especially emphasized that this was a very bad time for us
      and made the project looking incompetent. Apart from him, Amine
      Khaldi and Johannes Anderwald (his mentor) were very angry about
      this as well.
    - Two days after these mails, Neeraj Yadav reappeared on IRC.
■ Neeraj Yadav said he was really sorry about his mistake, but also 
explained his actions:
    - He mentioned that his case was actually the opposite of what
      Google might assume: While some students keep in contact with the
      organisation until they get their first payment, he actually
      disappeared during the community bonding period, but was available
      again on the first day when coding started.
    - His sudden absence occurred, because he needed to move to his
      brother who lives in a remote place with no internet connectivity.
■ Ged again emphasized that a wrong decision on this can affect our 
further participation in Google's Summer of Code project.
■ After a long discussion, it was decided that this matter requires a 
private conversation between Johannes Anderwald and Ged Murphy and a 
final decision needs to be taken by them.

Please note that this is a very shortened version of the discussion and 
you should not build an opinion about the issue just from this information.

○ Point 3 (added): Changes in the meeting organisation
-------------------------------------------------------
■ Victor Martinez proposed to create a list of E-Mail addresses of 
ReactOS Members, who are then informed one week before the meeting takes 
place.
    - This idea was immediately rejected by Aleksey Bragin and Samuel
      Serapion, because we have the ros-dev mailing list for this.
    - Victor Martinez then proposed that someone at least sends a mail
      to ros-dev one week in advance. Colin Finck, Gabriel Ilardi, Jan
      Blomqvist Kinander and Pierre Schweitzer agreed to this.
    - Colin Finck proposed that Aleksey Bragin could take this job.
      Aleksey Bragin agreed.
■ Jan Blomqvist Kinander asked whether we could already begin at 19:00 
UTC. This required a voting between all participants (excluding the 
people who only came to us through GSoC). As Colin Finck has not fixed 
the IRC server with voting capabilities yet, the voters were publicly 
asked about their opinion. Result:
    - 17 positive votes
    - 1 abstention
    - 0 negative votes

The remaining participants were not available and did not vote. Even 
without them, this result shows that we have a clear simple majority, so 
further meetings will begin at 19:00 UTC.

○ Point 4: Current ReactOS work, Developers reporting their status
-------------------------------------------------------------------
■ Aleksey Bragin had a busy month, which began by giving a technical 
lecture about ReactOS at Prague's technical university in the faculty of 
informatics. It was received quite well with enough of interesting 
questions. Afterwards, he moved to Berlin to join Matthias at our 
LinuxTag booth. He describes the event as a very crowded and well 
advertised one. On top of this, the ReactOS booth was located quite 
close to the entrance, so we received a lot of visitors. Despite 
LinuxTag being Europe's biggest Open-Source event, 99% of the incoming 
people were German, so Matthias had to handle most of them.
Regarding ReactOS development, Aleksey is still working on his LDR 
rewrite and fixed a few of the blocker bugs. There is still one serious 
problem left until he can commit the rewrite to Trunk and gradually 
improve it there, which should be done much faster. When this is done 
and there are no new regressions left, he wants to perform a full Wine sync.
■ Art Yerkes has spent most time working on DWARF symbols. He made slow 
progress towards reading the arguments off the stack as described by the 
DWARF debug information. After Colin Finck asked, he also reported about 
NewCC being in the same state as before, namely still requiring 
performance improvements and regression testing until it can be merged 
back to Trunk.
■ Cameron Gutman has been doing work on the PnP manager involving hot 
swapping devices (like implementing device ejection, surprise removal, 
etc.). He is almost done with his implementation of 
IoRequestDeviceEject. The code is currently unused, but the USB work 
might be a good testcase for it.
■ Colin Finck has returned to Germany two weeks ago and has been busy 
with (mostly routine) foundation and server work. He is also relocating 
in August, so he might be missing time for ReactOS work afterwards. For 
now, his list basically inclues three ReactOS-related points:
    - Fixing the bug in the IRC server we used for the March meeting
    - Starting work on "RosBE 2.0" (certainly together with dreimer),
      which also includes establishing fixed build tool versions for the
      big CMake rollout
    - Helping with the big website revamp
■ Gabriel Ilardi is quite busy lately, so he is mainly following the 
forum and contributed some bitmaps for logonui.
■ Giannis Adamopoulos is exclusively working on the Theming task for GSoC.
■ Ged Murphy as our GSoC administrator has been pretty busy with related 
work. However, he has recently started to work on the conversion of 
shell32 to C++ and just finished merging back all changes from the C 
version. He especially wants to thank Andrew Hill for his first work on 
the C++ version and in particular his ATL headers, which give us a true 
OO COM implementation. Additionally, he has started work on a logonui 
module, but this is just a fun project for now. Finally, he has a 
partially working NTFS driver, but this project is currently put on hold.
■ James Tabor is researching bug reports and building a list of related 
issues and problems in the server-side window procedures. As we 
currently do not have a functional screensaver, he is also trying to fix 
this.
■ Jan Blomqvist Kinander is planning a new burglar-proof server bunker 
fire cell at his workplace and will move our Fezile server (currently 
hosting Doxygen and ISO Storage) there. He is also planning to make room 
for a LAN behind the Fezile server, which we could use for automatic 
tests on real hardware.
■ Johannes Anderwald is teaming with Michael Martin to develop the USB 
stack. The current goal is to bring a working USB mass storage stack to 
ReactOS. From this perspective, the goal is already reached for USB 2.0. 
Today, he also got OHCI 1.1 mass storage support working and added some 
fixes for keyboard/mice support in the USBOHCI driver. This still 
requires proper HID support in a higher class driver though. The next 
goals probably include UHCI support and synchronizing the work with 
Cameron's PnP fixes and Pierre's Mount Manager work.
■ Kamil Hornicek has been arranging Aleksey's speech in Prague, but did 
not have time for other ReactOS-related work. If anybody has an 
interesting side project, he is willing to find some spare time for it 
though.
■ Maciej Bialas hopes to get back to working on our new website in the 
next one or two weeks. He has lately been setting up a local Bugzilla 
and evaluated its authentication capabilities when combined with Drupal CMS.
■ Matthias Kupfer has been attending our LinuxTag booth for all three 
days and is now working on a lot of "end-user-visible" parts in his 
spare time. Since LinuxTag, he has started with the internationalization 
of registry entries and small changes like adding the progress bar back 
to FreeLdr. Besides, he also does routine work for the German ReactOS 
foundation.
■ Olaf Siejka has been working on testing and pushing patches (as 
reported by Gabriel Ilardi). He also reported that the CMake/MSVC builds 
are now compiled from Trunk, but he needs to reinstall his Buildslave 
with Windows 7 SP1 and thinks about buying a fast SSD for it. Finally, 
he is in the middle of converting Polish resources to UTF-8 and perform 
some cleanup and style corrections in the process.
■ Rafal Harabien has been busy with real life issues lately, but plans 
to fix our cursors implementation in Win32k soon and clipboards afterwards.
■ Samuel Serapion is writing code for NTLM authentication stuff and will 
move to the MSV1_0 and LSA modules afterwards. He referred to 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa378753%28v=vs.85%29.aspx for 
explanations about what these modules are used for.
■ Timo Kreuzer is exclusively working on the FreeType font driver for GSoC.
■ Victor Martinez has been presenting ReactOS at small Spanish 
conferences about Open-Source in Seville and Huelva (again) before he 
joined Aleksey and Matthias at LinuxTag in Berlin. Lately, he has been 
modifying the Testing Central Wiki page, where the GoldenApps now point 
to the Compatibility Database. Finally, he plans to establish a real 
Testing Team (mainly from Forum users) together with Olaf.
■ Ziliang Guo has been working on several things like building and 
verifying the drivers which are going to be signed with the ReactOS 
Foundation certificate. He is also testing out a new MSI installer for 
RosBE-Windows. His work towards the website overhaul is currently on 
hold, because he first needs to install some more modules.

○ Meeting closed at 22:36 UTC by Colin Finck on behalf of Aleksey Bragin.
○ Minutes written by Colin Finck.