About the recent USETUP improvements in the branch - Ros-dev

18 May 2017


      Hi all,
Im writing a short mail to explain the recent USETUP improvements Im doing
in the
https://svn.reactos.org/svn/reactos/branches/setup_improvements/base/setup/
branch.
The aim is three-fold:
-          To improve multi-OSes / bootloaders detection and solve
https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-4870 ,
https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-12672 ,
https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13188 ,
https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13226 in a consistent & reliable way,
and possibly having a look at https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-13205 and
https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-10898 (low priority for me at the
moment).
-          A bit related to the previous point, have the possibility to
automatically detect existing installations of ReactOS (and of Windows) to
allow simple upgrade. For this latter part I have code that almost works: it
browses all the available partitions on all the disks, and for each,
attempts to see whether either freeldr or ntldr is installed, and if so,
open their respective configuration files, browse the latter, and from that,
deduce the candidate NT installations. On the following screenshot :
http://i.imgur.com/Nq67J1o.png , a Windows installation actually exists on
partition(1) but is not listed because it happens to be on an NTFS
partition. Then there is a ReactOS installation on a FAT partition(2), and
finally a Windows installation on another FAT partition(4) (all on the
same disk). The installation detector has respectively parsed freeldr.ini,
and boot.ini, to deduce the installations, and have removed installations
having the same disk and partition numbers and SystemRoot (otherwise you
would have seen many ReactOS (xxx) entries).
-          To facilitate the future implementation of the 1st-stage GUI
setup by someone, all the code that can be made common between USETUP and
this future GUI setup, is placed into a library. At the time of writing,
this concerns the so-called generic lists functionality as well as the
partition lists & some file-system-related routines. It will certainly grow
up later.
Cheers,
Hermès
P.S.: Using a 8x8 font for the installer quickly hurts the eyes (and it has
been like that since ages). It would be great to use a more readable
resolution / font size