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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On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 02:37:57PM -0800, Steven Edwards wrote:
- We need to improve our documentation and website.
Most of us even like the Wiki system as its not hassle and can maintain a history as well.
You might want to consider using a wiki for the whole site, or at least the whole documentation part of the site (everything which isn't the mainpage/newspage). Other projects are already doing this (for instance: http://www.rubyonrails.org ). Of course it has disadvantages (people/bots could fuck it up (reactos-haters/spambots)) but you can just as easily revert those changes. And if the wiki spits out a rss feed of recent changes i'm sure that there are people willing to check wether the updates are valid/correct (at least i will).
Mark
Steven
- We need a roadmap for the future.
Agreed.
- We have to have regression testing in place.
Yes - Casper's doing a lot of great work on this; with regards to WineHQ tests, well, we'll have to see if we can't find a way to integrate them. Right now let's just focus on getting the Continuous Integration System going.
- We need to improve our documentation and website.
I've already thought about this a lot; definitely a wiki for the Library - with access only to devs to make changes; a wiki doesn't have to allow just anyone to make a change and I don't think that's a good idea. I've already introduced MedaWiki at work (it powers Wikipedia.com) and would really want to get this on reactos.com for our Library -- probably a few other pages as well.
I don't want to see a wiki only site. A wiki doesn't enforce structure, which is nice for something like a blog or list of compatible hardware/software, or forum. We'll use the best software suited to the job -- this means that a lot of effort will have to go into integration: search but more importantly login.
It's just that to get there is a ton of work! The website needs its own roadmap, for sure.
- We need to develop relationships with vendors.
Yeah, as you said, once we're a bit further on.
- 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.
This has to get done as the Continuous Integration System will work on Subversion.
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 to all the developers that attended and the great job done in representing the project!!
Cheers Jason
Hi Jason,
--- Jason Filby jason.filby@gmail.com wrote:
I've already thought about this a lot; definitely a wiki for the Library - with access only to devs to make changes; a wiki doesn't have to allow just anyone to make a change and I don't think that's a good idea. I've already introduced MedaWiki at work (it powers Wikipedia.com) and would really want to get this on reactos.com for our Library -- probably a few other pages as well.
Either a wiki or rosdocs is cool with me. I dont really care as long as it has version control and its a system thats easy for people to use. For now I have updated rosdocs as well as using the wiki on mok and will keep doing so until we have a working system in place.
I don't want to see a wiki only site. A wiki doesn't enforce structure, which is nice for something like a blog or list of compatible hardware/software, or forum. We'll use the best software suited to the job -- this means that a lot of effort will have to go into integration: search but more importantly login.
What would really be nice would be if we could extend rosdocs and a wiki a bit to be able to read the OpenOffice XML format. It would make writing/uploading documentation easy.
It's just that to get there is a ton of work! The website needs its own roadmap, for sure.
T on IRC has offered to help with the website.
- We need to develop relationships with vendors.
Yeah, as you said, once we're a bit further on.
I think there is some work we can start on this now. I am going to start attempting to get a large hardware donation for ReactOS developers. It would be really nice if we all had semi-good laptops to use to demo ReactOS to others.
Thanks Steven
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Hi Steven
Either a wiki or rosdocs is cool with me. I dont really care as long as it has version control and its a system thats easy for people to use.
The wiki shows revisions; diffs are available -- and it is very easy to use.
What would really be nice would be if we could extend rosdocs and a wiki a bit to be able to read the OpenOffice XML format. It would make writing/uploading documentation easy.
The wiki has it's own tagging/formatting -- no need to worry about that; for example:
==This is a header==
Indicates a Level 1 header - just add equals signs to change the level. You can also use HTML tags such as <LI> for lists.
T on IRC has offered to help with the website.
Yes - T (Michael) and Casper are going to be driving the process; Michael has also volunteered to take on the web site coordinator position.
I think there is some work we can start on this now. I am going to start attempting to get a large hardware donation for ReactOS developers. It would be really nice if we all had semi-good laptops to use to demo ReactOS to others.
Also in the hardware dept: various devices for compatibility testing.
Cheers Jason
Steven Edwards wrote:
- 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.
Download the latest Winetest http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/winetest-latest.exe
from here: http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/paulm/WRT/CrossBuilt/
And run it on ReactOS, then you get all the Wine tests...
A shortcut for now... has anybody tried it?
Which OS version does ReactOS report as BTW?
regards, Jakob
--- Jakob Eriksson jakov@vmlinux.org wrote:
And run it on ReactOS, then you get all the Wine tests...
A shortcut for now... has anybody tried it?
Which OS version does ReactOS report as BTW?
It should report Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000. The problem with running winetest is that a good number of the tests crash or cause a bugcheck under ReactOS. We need to import the ones that work and do a todo(reactos) block on the ones that fail. The idea is that when we start the regression suite all the tests pass.
Thanks Steven
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Jakob Eriksson -
Jason Filby -
mark＠ijbema.xs4all.nl -
Steven Edwards