[ros-dev] Time has come, a call to developers

[Daniel Reimer]

Aleksey Bragin schrieb:
> 	Hello,
> this message is inspired by a lot of thinking, and yesterdays talk in  
> #reactos, when Magnus Olsen's proposition to add support for more  
> than one graphic adapter was a last drop into my cup of tolerancy.
>
> Thus I want to say, one very important idea. But what I want even  
> more, for our developers to understand it. The key idea is that our  
> work on the project now MUST be aimed at bugfixing, not at adding  
> even more nice features. There are already quite enough of them  
> (features)!
>
> As I said 1000 times, our general "users" don't care about ability to  
> insert 3 graphic cards into their PC, and get ReactOS using them!  
> They care about ReactOS crashing after closing regedit. Or during  
> Office 2003 installation. And if it continues to crash this way, I'm  
> sorry, but noone could feel the pleasure of multiple graphic cards  
> support, or any other feature which is useless for 99% of potential  
> users.
>
> Moreover, I don't understand why noone ever bothered to work through  
> the winetests for reactos-specific parts of the system, like GDI,  
> user32/win32k testing, kernel32 testing. There are lots of failures,  
> and wine test results show APIs which are used for REAL, and by REAL  
> applications, not some historic APIs implemented by Magnus (no  
> offence, I'm just using him as an example, please excuse me if I  
> sound harsh anywhere) which are unused by any real application nowadays.
>
> I clearly want to stress, that there is a strong misconcept in  
> ReactOS way of development of its Win32 subsystem. There were a lot  
> of positive events happening (win32k native tests library, great work  
> by Timo at fixing various small issues, handles, memory leaks, etc).  
> But it must be continued!
>
> Ged Murphy said very right about the problem: small problems prevent  
> big apps from working. Wine already supports Office 2003 for years,  
> and noone except me was trying to make support it better. The same  
> applies to everywhere, there is no need to have some special skills  
> to improve ReactOS. You know, there are not that many people who  
> *really* worked on win32k in Microsoft, and they obviously can't code  
> for us anyway, so everyone had to learn how to develop one or another  
> part of the system. Look at Stefan Ginsberg - a guy who didn't know  
> anything about C development 3 months ago, but learnt just by reading  
> ros-diffs (well, and constant private messaging me in IRC asking  
> questions, but that doesn't count), and yesterday spotted a couple of  
> important real problems.
>
> Especially that counts for Win32-subsystem (the kernel must stay as  
> strict NT-alike as legally possible, so it takes time to read all  
> available literature), but for Win32-subsystem, just maintaining its  
> code would result in a hundred less crashes now! I don't even say  
> about rewriting bad written parts. Or just simply, very-very simply,  
> syncing Wine's changes back into ReactOS!
>
> But nobody cares to do that.
>
> I especially delay the 0.3.5 release, because I want people to  
> concentrate more on bugfixes. We could easily release in the  
> beginning of may, there are enough of good changes for a usual  
> reactos release. But I want this particular release to be *unusual*.
>
> If ReactOS wants to hit beta this year, developers must concentrate  
> on a boring work first, believe me, there will be lots more fun when  
> amount of people trying out reactos increases at least 100x.
>
> And if no beta this year, I'm sorry to say, but it may be too late.
>
>
> Thanks for thorough reading. Comments are welcome.
>
>
> With the best regards,
> Aleksey Bragin.
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>
>   
I think concentrating to new Features is a good idea, but as long as 
ReactOS hangs on 2/3 of tries to install it, these should go into some 
branches. As long as ROS is unstable the main concentration should be in 
fixing the bugs which cause the instability. I more than second 
Aleksey's Mail. I got a mail from a guy some minutes ago which clearly 
shows, what ppl want and expect:

Are you a programmer on the ReactOS team? If yes, can you explain why Reactos can not be run or installed? I keep reading use Vbox, also, is Reactos dos? The most important question I have is, is the base stable and it's more about getting the apps made for windows  working on ReactOS? 


I answered him with the same nice argument we all use all the time: Its 
Alpha etcetc blablabla.