A couple points and a question

[Richard Campbell]

After tomorrow night I will no longer be recieving mail from the list.  
I am moving from Swartz Creek Michigan to Dana Point California.  I will 
have internet access when i get there and will get back on the lists as 
soon as i can.

Once i complete my move to california and get a job, i intend to resume 
coding on ReactOS.  In particular i'd like to get winrar, winzip, and 
other utilities to work

I would like to take some time and modify the apps in the ros-apps 
repository to use the latest stable build of mingw + the latest stable 
build of w32api instead of the reactos build system, is this okay or is 
there a reason that we are using the ReactOS build system?

So i'll see everybody soon!

Regards,
Richard

[Vizzini]

On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 04:27, Richard Campbell wrote:
>   I would like to take some time and modify the apps in
> the ros-apps 
>  repository to use the latest stable build of mingw + the latest stable 
>  build of w32api instead of the reactos build system, is this okay or is 
>  there a reason that we are using the ReactOS build system? 
[long-winded analysis followed by a proposal and request for comments]

I've been giving this some thought lately.  This is not as trivial of a
question as it seems.  In the windows world, on the kernel side at
least, there is a single approved compiler (i.e. one particular build),
which is shipped on the DDK CD.  You must use precisely the build
environment (compilers, headers, and import libraries) that are shipped
in the DDK in order to be supported by Microsoft and/or the community.

Linux used to require GCC 2.7.2.3 - i don't know what it asks for now,
but the reason had to do with a combination of compiler bugs that had
been worked around and some insulation against future upsetting changes.

On the flip side, Royce Mitchell used to say that he preferred to use an
old GCC to build ROS with because it caught different coding errors, and
lots of people (myself included) believe that we should not be tied to a
compiler because that makes us dangerously dependant on that compiler. 
Also, MSVC and Intel both generate better code in certain circumstances
(see a recent Doctor Dobb's article for a c++ comparison among those
three and others).

The current source tree doesn't support MSVC in a few places (I know
NDIS, for sure, won't compile right, and I remember seeing others), so
for the moment we really are MinGW-dependant.  I also worry about people
getting a random compiler/w32api/whatever, having problems, and getting
a bad impression of the project due to a broken build - and the way it
breaks will look ugly most of the time.  The final straw for me, though,
is that we can't do some things like enabling -Werror in our makefiles
because we're afraid we'll break people's builds.

With that said, I propose that we go the Microsoft route, but provide
instructions for people that want to experiment with other stuff.  We
should have an official version of the compiler, linker, binutils, etc,
and an official w32api version.  If anybody has time, it'd be nice to
package the ReactOS SDK/DDK with the tools, headers, libs, and so on, so
that new developers can come up to speed more quickly.

So, what does everyone else think?

 -Vizzini

[Guido]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 10:34:07 -0500
Vizzini <vizzini(a)plasmic.com> wrote:

[snip]

>   Linux used to require GCC 2.7.2.3 - i don't know
> what it asks for now,
>  but the reason had to do with a combination of compiler bugs that had
>  been worked around and some insulation against future upsetting
>  changes. 
Hmmm, that was a long time ago, you must be almost as old as I am ;-)
Anyway, IIRC that was during the EGCS fork and the linux kernel would
not compile on that beast. Later when EGCS and GCC hadmerged again and
the GCC 3.x series was being developed, the linux kernel still required
GCC 2.95. Today many packages require patches for compilation with GCC
3.3.x.

To make a long story short, dependancy on a certain building environment
is very common. ReactOS is no exception.

[snip]

>   With that said, I propose that we go the Microsoft
> route, but provide
>  instructions for people that want to experiment with other stuff.  We
>  should have an official version of the compiler, linker, binutils,
>  etc, and an official w32api version.  If anybody has time, it'd be
>  nice to package the ReactOS SDK/DDK with the tools, headers, libs, and
>  so on, so that new developers can come up to speed more quickly. 
At present the tools et al are available in separate packages from the
ReactOS website. IMO repackaging into a development kit is a good idea.

- Guido

[Michael B. Trausch]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Guido wrote:
>  
>  At present the tools et al are available in separate packages from the
>  ReactOS website. IMO repackaging into a development kit is a good idea.
>  
Is there any way that we can have a devel kit released both for Windows
and for Linux, for ReactOS?

Or are those of us still using Linux to work with this, going to be stuck
with it?  :-P

	Later,
	Mike

Michael B. Trausch                                AIM:  MBTrausch
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[Steven Edwards]

I think we should only the latest stable Mingw release is. When Filip
and I have done porting work on WINE and the w32api I have always tried
to leave any of my changes as disabled untill the latest w32api
release. I am always sending minor patches to mingw for the w32api and
the ReactOS developer shouldnt have to keep up with those. Any code
that goes in to the development or release trunck should always be able
to be built with the latest stable releases or it should be disabled.

That being said I think on a per driver/dll or per application basis we
can support MS_VC with the PSDK. Some of our drivers, ntoskrnl and
other misc stuff wont build on other compilers due to gccisms. We
really should attempt to get all drivers/dlls/apps to build and work on
WinNT/2K though using MS_VC.

Thanks
Steven

--- Vizzini <vizzini(a)plasmic.com> wrote:
>   With that said, I propose that we go the Microsoft
> route, but provide
>  instructions for people that want to experiment with other stuff.  We
>  should have an official version of the compiler, linker, binutils,
>  etc,
>  and an official w32api version.  If anybody has time, it'd be nice to
>  package the ReactOS SDK/DDK with the tools, headers, libs, and so on,
>  so
>  that new developers can come up to speed more quickly.
>  
>  So, what does everyone else think? 

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