Ros-general

ros-general@reactos.org

1050 discussions

ReactOS 0.4.11 to be released tomorrow, March 4, 2019 - Press Kit is online!
by Colin Finck 03 Mar '19

03 Mar '19

Hi all! ReactOS 0.4.11 is going to be released tomorrow, Monday, March 4, 2019. The download will be officially available around noon (CEST). A Press Kit for the ReactOS 0.4.11 release is already available: https://download.reactos.org/reactos/ReactOS/0.4.11/ReactOS-0.4.11-PressKit… Feel free to send it to interested parties to let them know about the upcoming release in advance. Best regards, Colin Finck

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Re: [ros-general] [ros-dev] Web services down
by Pierre Schweitzer 26 Dec '18

26 Dec '18

We seem to be back to normal state. Please report if some service is still not working properly. Pierre Schweitzer <pierre.schweitzer(a)reactos.org> wrote on Wed, December 26th, 2018, 4:43 PM: > Dear all, > > Due to an unexpected outage touching our hoster infrastructure, our DB server is currently down and it affects all the web services relying on it. So, don't expect Jira, boards, wiki, website, and so on to work properly for now, > I'll keep you informed when I have more information. > > Cheers, > Pierre > > _______________________________________________ > Ros-dev mailing list > Ros-dev(a)reactos.org > http://reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev

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Web services down
by Pierre Schweitzer 26 Dec '18

26 Dec '18

Dear all, Due to an unexpected outage touching our hoster infrastructure, our DB server is currently down and it affects all the web services relying on it. So, don't expect Jira, boards, wiki, website, and so on to work properly for now, I'll keep you informed when I have more information. Cheers, Pierre

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Website and JIRA Migration on Friday
by Colin Finck 21 Nov '18

21 Nov '18

Hi all, Our last 3 servers are finally being migrated on Friday morning (UTC). Expect downtimes for the following services during this period: * https://reactos.org * https://jira.reactos.org * https://lam.reactos.org As always, I will try my best to keep the downtimes low and let you know when everything is over. Best regards, Colin Finck

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ReactOS 0.4.10 to be released tomorrow, November 6, 2018 - Press Kit is online!
by Colin Finck 13 Nov '18

13 Nov '18

Hi all! ReactOS 0.4.10 will be released tomorrow, Tuesday, November 6, 2018! The download will be officially available around noon (CEST). A Press Kit for the ReactOS 0.4.10 release is already available: https://download.reactos.org/reactos/ReactOS/0.4.10/ReactOS-0.4.10-PressKit… Feel free to send it to interested parties to let them know about the upcoming release in advance. Best regards, Colin Finck

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[ros-announce] ReactOS 0.4.10 released
by Colin Finck 06 Nov '18

06 Nov '18

The ReactOS project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.10, the latest of our quarterly cadence of releases. The project has seen an increasing emphasis on consistency and stability over the past few months, an emphasis the rapid release schedule helps reinforce to provide a better end-user experience. Even as new pieces of functionality are added, all this would be for naught if a user could not access them reliably. Booting from BTRFS ================== The headline feature for 0.4.10 would have to be ReactOS’ ability to now boot from a BTRFS formatted drive. The work enabling this was part of this year’s Google Summer of Code with student developer Victor Perevertkin. While the actual filesystem driver itself is from the WinBtrfs project by Mark Harmstone, much of Victor’s work was in filling out the bits and pieces of ReactOS that the driver expected to interact with. The filesystem stack in ReactOS is arguably one of the less mature components by simple dint of there being so few open source NT filesystem drivers to test against. Those that the project uses internally have all gone through enough iterations that gaps in ReactOS are worked around. WinBtrfs on the other hand came with no such baggage to its history and instead made full use of the documented NT filesystem driver API. Parallel to this effort was more basic work needed to expose the option to use BTRFS in the ReactOS installer and bootloader. It is all well and good for ReactOS to have a working driver, but the user ultimately needs to have a way to put it into use. The combined effort proved fruitful indeed, and users are invited to try out BTRFS support in 0.4.10. The newness of the feature will mean there will be the inevitable bug here and there, but it can only be with the community’s assistance in reporting them that the project can further improve. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_1.png Frontend Improvements ===================== When someone uses ReactOS, the interface through which they do so is the shell. And underpinning the shell’s functionality is the shell32 library, whose improvements are often directly exposed to the end user. For the past few months Katayama Hirofumi, a longtime contributor to the project, has fleshed out several new features while making improvements to other existing ones. For those of us whom do any significant amount of work on the command prompt, a wide range of tricks and shortcuts exist to make our lives easier. One such trick is being able to drag and drop a file or directory from the file explorer onto the command line in order to get its full path. And to complement this trick, Katayama-san has also made improvements to those of us that are steeped in the graphical shell more than the command prompt. In the past ReactOS offered only extremely limited means of interacting with things in the shell. Folders in explorer were rendered only a certain way, you could not change whether to use a single versus double click to enter them, and interacting with multiple windowed applications was clunky and more limited than one might expect. All this and more have been improved, and the following screenshot sums up that improvement far more succinctly than mere words can. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_2.png https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_3.gif The overall look and feel of ReactOS has also improved, or rather that of applications that run upon it. One special class of applications would be installers, of which the MSI family performs graphical rendering based on font heights. Users are likely to recall in the past a certain something just looking off when running MSI installers, just something slightly askew in how these installers appeared. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_4.png As seemingly small as these features may sound, many of them are expected by a user and their absence does not go unnoticed. Indeed the greatest success ReactOS could achieve is to have a user not even have to think when they navigate the system, everything working the way they expect. Katayama-san’s work takes us further down that path, the culmination of a multitude of small steps along the way. Finally, the project would be remiss to not mention the contributions of other developers to the shell’s continuing improvement. While Hermès Bélusca-Maïto’s important backend work remains somewhat inscrutable to end users, fixes by Denis Malikov and Jared Smudde to deal with file copying and shortcut creation will likely be more easily appreciated as another sign that ReactOS works, as expected. Stability ========= Stability is generally a hard thing to quantify, since it is often very subjective. Probably one thing that we can all agree on is that anything that prevents ReactOS, or applications running on it from crashing is a plus in the stability column. To that end while improvements to the memory management stack by Timo Kreuzer and Pierre Schweitzer might sound opaque and vague, they are nonetheless instrumental to ReactOS’ stability. Simultaneously, each time a major widely used application achieves full functionality on ReactOS, also constitutes a victory. A contribution by Stanislav Motylkov to the C Runtime library used in ReactOS now allows Git, the version control software used by this very project, to finally work correctly. A nice follow-up to the self-hosting achievement from last time around, we think many would agree. And of course no one is a fan of BSoDs, even if they evoke a slight sense of nostalgia. Fortunately for ReactOS’ sake, Mark Jansen was able to nail the cause of one such crash relating to the FreeType font library. Better that blue screens are consigned to our memories than be a perennial part of our daily computing experience. The surest metric of stability is however arguably how much of ReactOS and the desired collection of applications one wants to run actually work. For this, there as yet remains no substitute for human testing. To that end Joachim Henze has invested a tremendous amount of time, performing what amounts to continuous regression testing even before the formal process of preparing the release began. The fruit of his labors sits before you today, and while you may not see the countless number of fixes, reversions, and tweaks that were selectively filtered to produce version 0.4.10, rest assured that together they combine to provide a worthy testament to the effort that is the ReactOS Project. We hope you enjoy. Other Improvements ================== Stanislav Motylkov did some work on correctly retrieving BIOS information. Now the blank entries in dxdiag are filled with actual values. The community helped him to gather over 1000 unique BIOS dumps to help him test the implementation. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/reactos_0410_5.png Third Party Attributions ======================== As always, it would be remiss for the project to not provide acknowledgement of the third party bits we make use of. For this release, Amine Khaldi has synchronized the user-mode DLLs to WINE-Staging version 3.9. Furthermore as mentioned above, ReactOS’ support for BTRFS owes a debt of gratitude to the WinBTRFS project, of which Pierre has synchronized to the latest version, 1.0.2. Statistics ========== JIRA Issues fixed (this includes both bugs and improvements) - 148 Number of commits - 660 The oldest bug fixed for 0.4.10 - https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-1246 0.4.10-release branch was forked from master on 2018-08-23 after 0.4.10-dev-630-gb8e98c4 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0410-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.10 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.10 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.10 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.10 - Community video showcasing some 0.4.10 features: https://youtu.be/4JxfyPoCl8I - Download page: https://reactos.org/download _______________________________________________ Ros-announce mailing list Ros-announce(a)reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-announce

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Contribution for Tracing APIs
by Biswapriyo Nath 03 Sep '18

03 Sep '18

I've some working code for event tracing APIs like StartTrace, OpenTrace, ControlTrace etc. Those works in Windows 10 but are not present in ReactOS Advapi.dll. How can I add those APIs?

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[ros-announce] ReactOS 0.4.9 released
by Colin Finck 14 Aug '18

14 Aug '18

The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.9, the latest in our accelerated cadence targeting a release every three months. While a consequence of this faster cycle might mean fewer headliner changes, much of the visible effort nowadays comes in the form of quality-of-life improvements in how ReactOS functions. At the same time work continues on the underlying systems which provide more subtle improvements such as greater system stability and general consistency. Self-Hosting ============ The ability to build ReactOS on ReactOS, known as self-hosting, has often been touted as a sort of milestone in the OS’ maturity, but the details are far more nuanced. Compiling any large codebase, whether it be an operating system or even a web browser, stresses the system in a myriad of ways, with one of the biggest being memory usage and storage I/O. Code being compiled needs to be loaded from storage into memory, and more memory is required to hold all of the compiled objects as they are linked together. Scheduling is also to a certain extent stressed, as most modern build systems will attempt to spawn multiple compilation processes to speed up the build process. In the past, ReactOS was actually capable of self-hosting, but this capability came with significant caveats, with the biggest being this was achieved in a much older version of the ReactOS kernel. Since the reworking of the kernel into a more NT-compliant design and implementation, various gaps in functionality that remained to be completed rendered ReactOS unable to build itself again. After many years of hard effort, including the most recent batch of filesystem related changes done by Pierre Schweitzer, ReactOS is once more able to self-host. And in the spirit of open source, it was the FreeBSD project’s implementation of qsort that helped Pierre bridge some of the last pieces needed to achieve this. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image2.jpg Stability ========= A major source of system instability came from the complex interplay between the memory manager, the common cache, the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and the FastFAT driver. The biggest culprit in the instability came from the significant resource leakages caused by the FastFAT driver, resulting in it eating up the common cache to the point where attempts to copy large files would result in a crash. To rectify this problem, Thomas Faber and Pierre worked together to correct the FastFAT driver’s behavior, adding in write throttling support and restraining its usage of the cache. While a more conservative usage of the cache might see the system behave a bit more slowly during IO operations, it ensures that resources remain available to service for large IO operations instead of crashing like before. Another notable improvement on FastFAT is the rewrite of the support for dirty volumes greatly reducing the chance of file corruptions. Whenever a dirty volume is been detected during boot “chkdsk” (Check Disk) will trigger a repair on those volumes. This often can protect the system from becoming unusable after a crash. The two images below are showing chkdsk in action: https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image4.png https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image1.png In addition to the work done during regular development, Joachim Henze made a significant effort during the release candidate testing to track down regressions and other bugs that have crept in since the last release. It cannot be overstated just how much work such manual testing takes, and Joachim should be applauded for his dedication and perseverance in ensuring 0.4.9 would be the best release to date. Shell Improvements & Features ============================= Several quality of life improvements have come to the shell, the first of which is a built in zipfldr (Zip Folder) extension by Mark Jansen. While Windows has long possessed this capability, now ReactOS can also uncompress zipped files without needing to install third-party tools to accomplish it. And as the gif below demonstrates, ReactOS’ implementation is indeed very zippy. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image3.gif And of course with such new extensions it would probably be useful to be able to manage them, something that Katayama Hirofumi MZ has been working on, along with plenty of other improvements to the shell. Another major piece of functionality that might appear simple but is actually quite complex is the ability to choose whether to move, copy, or link a file or folder when you drag it with the right mouse button. This piece was completed by Giannis Adamopoulos, whose prior work has been so integral in making the current ReactOS shell behave and function in ways users are long used to from Windows. https://reactos.org/sites/default/files/imagepicker/1249/image5.gif Other Improvements ================== There are of course plenty of other changes in less trodden parts of ReactOS, with many people providing contributions and improvements. These range from the functional, like zooming no longer crashing in the Paint application thanks to Stanislav Motylkov, to more behind the scenes like Timo Kreuzer’s continued efforts to prepare the codebase to actually function when building a x64 target (the project owes Timo many bottles of beer for taking on that one). Other quality of life improvements include a new mouse properties dialog in the GUI component of the ReactOS installer by Eric Kohl, while Eric’s work involving starting and stopping of services, the device manager, and the sound mixer are more geared towards long term improvement and functionality. Hermès Bélusca-Maïto has continued his work in what might be termed the utilitarian applications of ReactOS, such as the clipboard viewer, the event viewer, the log-off dialog box, and the command prompt shell. And of course one can never forget RAPPS, the gateway program used for getting various applications installed on ReactOS. Considering ReactOS is intended to support many different languages, it is only appropriate that its unicode support be a priority, something that Alexander Shaposhnikov has lent his hand to. Compatibility in Windows is reliant on a ShimEngine that allows the loading of slightly different versions of libraries and APIs. ReactOS is much the same, and Mark has added the ability for ReactOS to present itself as Windows 8.1 with the Version APIs. As a sidenote, the engine itself proved useful in a rather unconventional manner when it was demonstrated to help reduce the loading time of the game Globulation 2. Of course ReactOS is not just about the features in the here and now, but also about preparations for the future. Thomas and Vadim Galyant have started merging in their improvements to the USB stack in preparation for native, official support for the oft requested booting from such devices. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer with every release. Since the transition to GitHub, the project has also received many pull requests from old and new contributors alike. The team offers its sincere thanks to everyone that has taken an interest in helping improve the project, and we look forward to meeting even more of you in the future. Syncing third parties ===================== ReactOS, being an open source project as well as its ecosystem, uses several bits of other open source projects. In 0.4.9 release Amine Khaldi has synced many user mode DLLs to WINE Staging version 3.3. Statistics ========== JIRA Issues fixed (this includes both bugs and improvements) - 137+ Number of commits - 922 The oldest bug fixed for 0.4.9 - https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-7744 Pull requests merged - 109 0.4.9-release branch was forked from master on 2018-05-20 after 0.4.9-dev-885-gddd03a8 - Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-049-released - General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.9 - Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.9 - Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.9 - Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.9 - Download page: https://reactos.org/download _______________________________________________ Ros-announce mailing list Ros-announce(a)reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-announce

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Website migrated to a new Login system
by Colin Finck 04 Jul '18

04 Jul '18

Hello all, Our website has been migrated to a new Login system today and all components have been upgraded to their latest versions. In the course of that, the user database has also been moved into an LDAP directory and cleaned from accounts that have never been used. Please check that everything is working alright and report bugs in our JIRA: https://jira.reactos.org You are also advised to change your password in the self-service at https://reactos.org/roslogin/?p=selfservice - even to the same one. Every password change from now on will use a state-of-the-art hashing algorithm (salted SHA-512 with 6000 rounds) to protect your account from credential theft. Unfortunately, there have been several newer accounts, for which the password could not be migrated. If you encounter problems logging in, please reset your account password at https://reactos.org/roslogin/?p=forgot to regain access. Best regards, Colin Finck

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Website Maintenance on Wednesday, July 4
by Colin Finck 01 Jul '18

01 Jul '18

Hi all! The ReactOS Website along with the Forum, Wiki, and JIRA bug tracker will be down for maintenance for several hours during the day (European time) on Wednesday, July 4. In the course of this process, the user database will be migrated to the new RosLogin Single-Sign-On system (https://github.com/reactos/web/tree/master/www/www.reactos.org/roslogin) and the Forum and Wiki software will be upgraded to their latest releases. This is expected to put an end to our login weirdnesses (dead Login buttons, 30 minute propagation delay to JIRA), solve the CAPTCHA problems people were reporting, and increase the maintainability of the website. I will be on the #reactos IRC channel during the migration and give status updates there. Best regards, Colin

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