[ros-dev] Win32 subsystem in 2013

[Aleksey Bragin]

Hi,
this message is a bit provocative, but please don't be offended by it. 
You all did a wonderful work during this year. Thank you!

It's very good to see the work is going on. Just for fun, when I had 
spare 15 minutes, I decided to check, what was done in the win32 
subsystem during this year by the major, respectable and very old time 
ReactOS developer, and whether my proposal with Arwinss still stands or not.

Here is what I found: (analyzing ~ 62 commits by jimtabor):

- 25 revisions: Fixes/hacks of our code (ReactOS-specific bug, works in 
Wine, sometimes says in comments "//// ReactOS : Justin Case something 
goes wrong.") (revs 58528, 58562, 58563, 58633, 58773, 58999, 59000, 
59201, 60054, 60587, 60590, 60592, 60622, 60626, 60659, 60676, 60677, 
60881, 61078, 61079, 61142, 61250, 61251, 61292, 61458)

- 13 revisions: Syncs with Wine (revs 59157, 59158, 59159, 60763, 60784, 
60807, 60820, 60858, 60863, 60865, 60867, 61244, 61422)

- 14 revisions: Own code development or rewriting old code, some of 
which might have been derived from ancient versions of Wine.
(60387, 60389, 60394, 60539, 60599, 60602, 60660, 60682, 60683, 60684, 
60718, 60883, 60976, 60992)

- 1 revision: attempt to fix a bug found in Wine (revision 60054, issue 
CORE-6024)

You don't need to be a scientist to see that 61% of the changes went 
into fixing ReactOS specific bugs or just bringing in newer Wine code to 
fix old Wine bugs. Remaining 22% of efforts was spent on actually 
developing our own, assumingly better code, and just 1 revision was 
spent on such a glorious thing as fixing Wine's bug.

ReactOS is a just for fun type of project, so I highly appreciate that 
efforts were put into all of the above!
However, I still think that it would be beneficial if someone would put 
similar efforts into Arwinss to eliminate the need to bring in hacks and 
fix stuff which works in Wine for years already, and focus on developing 
only those parts which we obviously can't share (GDI, hardware 
accelerated graphics, whatever else).

I lack time to do this myself, but if anyone volunteers I would be glad 
to help, share my experience and think up of interesting tasks. Like, 
getting Arwinss to work in Windows 2003 instead of its native subsystem, 
which would be a nice test.

Regards,
Aleksey Bragin