What I have learned on my time off (LinuxWorld)

[Steven Edwards]

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:
>   3. 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

[Jason Filby]

Steven

>  1. We need a roadmap for the future. 
Agreed.

>  2. 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.

>  3. 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.

>  4. We need to develop relationships with vendors.
Yeah, as you said, once we're a bit further on.

>  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. 
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

[Steven Edwards]

Hi Jason,

--- Jason Filby <jason.filby(a)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.

> >  4. 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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[Jason Filby]

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

[Jakob Eriksson]

Steven Edwards wrote:

>  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.
>   
>  
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

[Steven Edwards]

--- Jakob Eriksson <jakov(a)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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