My ReactOS Wishlist

[middings]

Adding a feature implies a promise to support that feature for many major releases afterward.

Feature creep kills.

[erkinalp]

Adding a feature does not inherently break compatibility by itself.

[EmuandCo]

If you change the behavior of a system dll in a non windows way, it will break compatibility. This is a fact.

[erkinalp]

No, targa functionality should not affect the behaviour of the rest of image decoders.

[Forever Winter]

TrueVision Targa (.tga) is 30+ years old, yet still widely used and supported by all primary graphical viewer/editor applications.

That is the difference between them. Targa is still used, MSP was never used and PCX is not relevant anymore except for legacy applications and maybe old games, like Black_Fox has noted.

I don't see any reason not to include it.

The same why Microsoft does not include support for any video codec someone has ever made. Oe why Notepad still loks mostly like from Windows 3.1.


However, my intention was not to tell someone that his wish for ReactOS is bad or whatever. I was just curious if he personally has a need for such rare stuff.

[erkinalp]

Notepad has no plugin system, hence it may be extended arbitrarily in ReactOS as long as we preserve Windows Notepad's edit control in ReactOS DLLs.

[Konata]

Personally I don't understand adding trivial things that can simply be installed over the OS like codecs or alternative text editors/applications. When I think of "wishlist features" I think of genuine improvements in the core functionality of the kernel and executive services. ReactOS is an operating system first and a distribution last, that's for other people to do. Adding some codecs or default programs is trivial, this thread should be about asking the highly-knowledgeable devs about the prospect of doing something that ReactOS or Server 2003 currently cannot do that won't break compatibility. That's why I asked for a textmode-only interface with working programs, because that's not quite as trivial as just running setup.exe.

[Z98]

To those of you asking for support for different media types, you are severely underestimating the core problem, which is that we do not have support for the Windows Imaging Component. Wine does not have an alternative implementation of it to begin with and we sure don't have one either. Without it, there is not a clean way to add new media formats, so until someone comes up with an implementation the discussion is moot.

[Forever Winter]

Sorry that I correct you, but both Wine as well as ReactOS have a WIC implementation and it works fine most of the time (Like on Vista+, Wine/ReactOS GDI+ is based on it).

[ercanersoy]

To add one more item onto this wishlist: the X PixMap (.xpm) format is used primarily by the X window system as distributed with most Unix-like OSes. It could potentially be simple enough to implement to view in the default image viewer, if desired.

TrueVision Targa (.tga) is 30+ years old, yet still widely used and supported by all primary graphical viewer/editor applications. The basic specification is just slightly harder than .bmp. I don't see any reason not to include it.

Good whishes. I agree.

[erkinalp]

The problem is the people expects from us to have a distribution, too, like Ubuntu/Ubuntu Core(ReactOS Standard/ReactOS Core in our situation). Not producing a basic batteries-included distribution will make userbase lower. Remember we are a firstinitskindof OS, first truly FOSS Windows-like OS.

[Z98]

Wine has WIC? The last time I checked up on it they were still recommending you go grab the installer targeting XP. It makes life easier, but if it's Wine's, then requests for added formats go to Wine, not us.

The people expecting ReactOS to have "distros" fundamentally misunderstand what a "distro" is. There are Linux distros because there is not an actual Linux operating system, there is the kernel and a bunch of components. In order to get a usable OS you have to bundle them together into a distro. ReactOS provides an entire OS out of the box. We are more akin to the BSDs and while there are dedicated distros for the BSDs, you'll note that there are far, far fewer of them and they tend to be little more than preconfiguring of the base OS, not a rebundling of the core packages.

[Forever Winter]

Yes, it has. Probably because it is still missing some stuff. There implementation doesn't support rotating or horizontal flipping at the moment. Also they miss many buildin color formats.
Sending requests to Wine for adding more formats to the buildin ones seems also not ideal to me. Since it is designed to be extendable by external components, the buildin ones should imho
be held at a minimum.

[Z98]

Don't quite understand your last line.

[PurpleGurl]

Don't quite understand your last line.

I get it. He's saying that such things are intended to be 3rd party components, not even Wine's responsibility, and that only the more important ones should be built-in, according to personal opinion.