White Paper outdated ?

[Maarten Bosma]

Our Withe Paper on http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/dev_whitepaper.html says
> The original target for ReactOS, with regards to driver and application 
> compatibility, was Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. Since then, Microsoft 
> Windows 2000 and Windows XP have been released. Microsoft Windows 2000 
> and Windows XP are both descendants of Windows NT. As such we can 
> gradually shift our compatibility target without worrying about the 
> architecture changing too much. In fact, internally, Windows 2000 
> reports version information as Windows 5.0 and Windows XP as Windows 
> 5.1. The ReactOS team have decided to maintain Windows NT 4.0 as the 
> official compatibility target. This is because most of the resources, 
> articles and books on Windows NT/2000/XP technology are written for 
> Windows NT 4.0. This does not mean that features present in later 
> versions of Windows NT based operating systems will not be implemented 
> in ReactOS.

Since we changed the reported version to Windows 2000, i'd say that is 
not true anymore is it ?

Maarten Bosma

[Royce Mitchell III]

Maarten Bosma wrote:
> Our Withe Paper on http://www.reactos.org/xhtml/en/dev_whitepaper.html 
> says
> > The original target for ReactOS, with regards to driver and 
> > application compatibility, was Microsoft Windows NT 4.0. Since then, 
> > Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP have been released. Microsoft 
> > Windows 2000 and Windows XP are both descendants of Windows NT. As 
> > such we can gradually shift our compatibility target without worrying 
> > about the architecture changing too much. In fact, internally, 
> > Windows 2000 reports version information as Windows 5.0 and Windows 
> > XP as Windows 5.1. The ReactOS team have decided to maintain Windows 
> > NT 4.0 as the official compatibility target. This is because most of 
> > the resources, articles and books on Windows NT/2000/XP technology 
> > are written for Windows NT 4.0. This does not mean that features 
> > present in later versions of Windows NT based operating systems will 
> > not be implemented in ReactOS.
>
> Since we changed the reported version to Windows 2000, i'd say that is 
> not true anymore is it ?

We report higher version for application compatibility reasons. It 
doesn't mean we're going after every win2k feature :)

[Maarten Bosma]

Royce Mitchell III wrote:
> > Since we changed the reported version to Windows 2000, i'd say that is 
> > not true anymore is it ?
>
> We report higher version for application compatibility reasons. It 
> doesn't mean we're going after every win2k feature :)

I still think that it would be good to change the official compatibly 
goal to 2000. Not for technical but just for "marketing" reasons. "NT 
4.0 Compatibly" simply sound odd. :P

Maarten Bosma

[TwoTailedFox]

Psychologically, "Windows 2000 Compatible" sounds a lot better than
"Windows NT 4.0 Compatible"

On 2/3/06, Maarten Bosma [e-mail] wrote:
> Royce Mitchell III wrote:
> > > Since we changed the reported version to Windows 2000, i'd say that is
> > > not true anymore is it ?
> >
> > We report higher version for application compatibility reasons. It
> > doesn't mean we're going after every win2k feature :)
>
> I still think that it would be good to change the official compatibly
> goal to 2000. Not for technical but just for "marketing" reasons. "NT
> 4.0 Compatibly" simply sound odd. :P
>
> Maarten Bosma
> _______________________________________________
> Ros-dev mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev

--
"I had a handle on life, but then it broke"

[David Hinz]

TwoTailedFox schrieb:
> Psychologically, "Windows 2000 Compatible" sounds a lot better than
> "Windows NT 4.0 Compatible"

The thing is, most people don't even know, that Windows XP is actually 
Windows NT 5.1 (or Windows 2000 ist Windows NT 5.0).
So it really makes sense to at least say "Windows 2000 compatible", as 
_most_ people don't know, that it makes nearly no difference (from the 
developers point of view) what the development target is, as it is 
nearly the same.

So maybe the development target should be set to Windows XP, as there 
are quite a lot people, not even knowing about Windows XP being the 
successor of Windows 2000.

Greets,

David Hinz

[Jerry]

I would have to agree with David here. Windows XP should be the target 
for compatibility.

David Hinz wrote:
> TwoTailedFox schrieb:
> > Psychologically, "Windows 2000 Compatible" sounds a lot better than
> > "Windows NT 4.0 Compatible"
>
> The thing is, most people don't even know, that Windows XP is actually 
> Windows NT 5.1 (or Windows 2000 ist Windows NT 5.0).
> So it really makes sense to at least say "Windows 2000 compatible", as 
> _most_ people don't know, that it makes nearly no difference (from the 
> developers point of view) what the development target is, as it is 
> nearly the same.
>
> So maybe the development target should be set to Windows XP, as there 
> are quite a lot people, not even knowing about Windows XP being the 
> successor of Windows 2000.
>
> Greets,
>
> David Hinz
>
> Ros-dev mailing list
> [e-mail]
> http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
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