When does 0.3.12 will come out?

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hto
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Post by hto »

Z98, I think that great depth at a high rate is not what people want. Publish more often simpler articles (if you have willingness to write them, of course), and profound articles from time to time. Sometimes the newsletters are difficult in places. One must go down to source level to be able to translate them into a different language.
jeremyk
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by jeremyk »

a
Last edited by jeremyk on Mon Jun 25, 2012 7:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Haos
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Haos »

It looks so easy on paper/forum, but have either one of you actually try to do it? As a translator, doing mainly newsletters at present time, i am required to present sufficient level of understanding regarding topics being described there. An additional issue is finding right terms in my language, that are not always being passed on a plate to you.

It should be sufficiently easy for me to understand newsletter, being actually a member of team and working more or less closely with others, still i have often do a thorough reading for a proper translation (example - traps and assembly intrinsics in previous newsletter). This is a developer-level source of information. When asking developers for details, you will mostly receive also developer-level info. Commits also pass information on developer-level, besides simple works/bug fixed kind of info. I`m not the smartest arse out there, not a programmer, but even if my experience is often not enough, how a person completely not a part of this project, will understand issues so closely related to it?

Why then i can't be a source of such informations? No time. Having roughly 3-5 hours for ReactOS a day (tops, if i'm not going out anywhere, just back home from work) i'm trying to keep up with commits, bugreports and forum posts, plus private emails, another forum and two webgames (requiring few clicks a day each). This takes up an hour at least. Building and testing (up to third stage, no apps) current revision on any of 3 environments (qemu, vbox, real hw) takes another half an hour - basic testing like this is required for catching at least some regressions. Rest of the time goes into one of the long-term issues, investigating found bugs, regress-testing, writing bugreports, trying out patches supposedly fixing them... this takes the rest. There is not much time i can squeeze from this. Any amount of time spent on anything bar things listed above will force me to stop one of them, all i consider being pretty core.

UNIATA issue on real hardware (7B bugcheck), for example, already took two weeks at least. It will take another 5-6 days before i check out all things i can do with it, waiting for devs to come up with any new ideas or solutions. Then, the fun may start again.

In my opinion, someone willing to take this job, should not only have sufficient knowledge regarding the project but also have a lot of free time and patience (as developers live in timezones all around the world). Such person, in my opinion, would still do more good helping out with project. Sorry, i know this is brutal, but its still a truth.
Z98
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Z98 »

jeremyk wrote:
Haos wrote:
jeremyk wrote: In the long run you just need one dedicated person to check in with the team mebers and get a feal of whats going on then that person can post it so every one else knows.
And what exactly do you think it is I'm doing? But getting information out of the developers can take anywhere from ten minutes to two hours. Some of the developers also openly admit they don't know how to explain their work well, so I have to phrase my questions very carefully to get information out of them, so a mass email wouldn't work since those devs wouldn't know how to answer. Combine this to me averaging around three developers per newsletter and you're looking at a significant amount of time just getting the basics out of some of them. And looking at the commit logs tells you very little for specifics. Using it for padding is utterly impractical due to the briefness of the messages. Simply repeating "Fixed X" or "Added Y" based off of the diffs is exactly the type of briefness that I try to avoid because it tells you nothing informative and tends to invite far too much incorrect speculation as people try to fill in the holes. and if I could actually extrapolate that much information from just the commit messages and the diffs, I'd likely be doing actual development instead of dealing with the newsletter.
jeremyk
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by jeremyk »

a
Last edited by jeremyk on Mon Jun 25, 2012 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
b4dc0d3r
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by b4dc0d3r »

It's difficult, and would probably end up being misleading at best. Given infinite resources, or at least a lottery winner to hire people and make them do what you want, all information would be available. Barring that, there are maybe 2 people trying to filter complex information from 37 developers (assuming that signature image is up to date) in an understandable way to an audience that ranges from facebook users to kernel hackers (and not necessarily Windows kernel, or x86). Finding time is only part of the problem, deciding who your audience is and what they want to know is far more challenging, especially since this project attracts such a diverse following.
I am not sure why they wouldn't be able to answer questions about their own coding.
maybe then just write down the core files that need to be coded then put a symbol of if its done its being worked on or has not been touched.
Anything that shows some kind of progress and let other know what they could be doing would be better then nothing at all.
You'd be surprised. Especially in straight C, where it is easy to write clever but incomprehensible code, there are so many little things to think about. It's like trying to explain the definition of a word you've read and used many times, but never read an actual definition. Working memory is limited, and sometimes you have to "page out" and can't connect the dots all at the same time. I have a much longer reply that I typed, but basically the people writing code are frequently thinking low-level details, and that doesn't translate well to the average follower, even if they do code for work or other projects.

In the example of USB support, it is difficult to know what files are going to exist until you have a good understanding of the standards involved, and in this case the Windows architecture which supports it. The developer could tell you the core filenames involved, but the value of that information is very low since the files might be rearranged, renamed, split, or merged as more code gets implemented. "USB: 15% implemented" might mean to some people that their mass storage device should work, but to a developer it might mean all of the headers are done but not one line of working code exists. So even that much is hard to do, and harder to agree upon. "USB: 50%" might suggest that your mouse might work, but it could very well mean "Inserting a USB device of any kind will brick your computer, but the .dll works on Windows as long as you only do this...."

In other words, this: http://xkcd.com/612/

There are 37 open bugs returned if you search for "regression" in bugzilla. If the front page of rectos.org announces something is working, then a commit makes it stop working, the project will look silly after 37 times, and that's just what's open right now. It's a work in progress, it's alpha, it's volatile. I posted my sources, I stay as up to date as possible, I read commits from CIA at least twice a day, I update from SVN and build it myself, I occasionally try to find bugs, and yet every newsletter there is something I did not know about, or did not understand at the time. Obviously more information is needed, obviously no one has time to do much more than is being done. At the same time, sometimes there just isn't any progress to report that would matter.

If you haven't been watching commits, Amine Khaldi among others has been rearranging headers to form a more coherent development kit, and those updates just got merged into the main source tree. To the end user, it's just updating about 150 files and no applications will work better or worse, there is nothing of interest to report. Does the average facebook and twitter user want to know that? No, they probably wouldn't have any idea what that means. But for people interested in operating system development and more specifically a replacement operating system, this is a huge effort and very good news indeed. At the beginning of this work, I'm pretty sure Amine would not have been able to say "142 files to alter" and then give gradual updates X% completed and so on. Where do we draw the line?

Whoever compiles the information gets to decide how detailed - If someone wants to compile commit messages and summarize ros-dev chatter, I will volunteer to be your personal technical advisor - the catch is, you have to live up to whatever you requested here or you're on your own. Start by making your own topic, or wiki page, message me occasionally, and keep the updates coming, even if it's just "257 commits this week - no idea what any of it means, but someone's obviously doing something and ros-arm-bringup verbally bitchslapped some people only twice." That information could get merged with developer input by whomever writes the next newsletter, which should be at least a little easier to write with help. At the same time, maybe you can get a good start on summarizing activity for the changelog, removing one of those roadblocks for the next release. (Even if project team hates you and your updates, you can maybe make your own wiki page, and if they like it maybe you get to update pages in the CMS - but I'm just an observer making suggestions so don't think I can grant stuff).

At one time, I knew nothing about Windows and thought it was magic, knew nothing about code or open source - everyone was like that. But we got better :)
Haos
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Haos »

@b4dc0d3r

There is nothing stopping you from actually doing this. Why dont you try to open such channels of communication and start publishing short notes? Even once per few days would be much in present time. You can count on Team's help and support, if you plan to carry it on seriously.
vicmarcal
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by vicmarcal »

It´s not quite difficult to create small amount of info for our users.As a proof you know i am doing a Spanish ReactOS Blog about our small achievements,and updating it 2-3 times at week.They are of course not quite technical, but Users arent really demanding the intrinsics of how ReactOS architecture is working, but Arwinss Screenshots(plus some comments),what is jcatena-branch,what is arty branch, how arty branch is going,why is important the new Header branch, who is that awesome guy called akhaldi that is flooding ReactOS Cia,how goes USB, which are the main issues with USB, what is the difference between USB 1.1 and 2.0 from the architectural pov and what is Bugboy doing¿1.1 or 2.0 or both?.How to set a Vbox machine, a Vmware machine, how to help?,telling them the main failures we are finding in Real Hardware,sending them to Uniata Thread to check the newest Timers,why 0.3.12 is delayed?,when the trunk is branched for a release,....etc...etc...etc...
Imo, Users doesnt mind about Hal rewrite(unless you explain them in easy words what is Hal and why is it used, easy words==explanation understandable for my grandma),about Trap Handlers(what is a Trap?What is a Handler?Why is it important?Is that interesting from the User point of view?)How the rewrite will affect Users?What is it going to solve(if any)?

Yes, i was told to pusblish it in English,but i dont find time to write in Spanish and also in English.If anyone wants to translate that into English i will be proud of let you doing that (of course linking to original and recognising the work).
Angelus
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Angelus »

vicmarcal wrote: Yes, i was told to pusblish it in English,but i dont find time to write in Spanish and also in English. If anyone wants to translate that into English i will be proud of let you doing that (of course linking to original and recognising the work).
It's worth!

Good job vicmarcal. I am an avid reader of your blog. ;)
Sof_T
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Sof_T »

What is the link to the blog?
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Black_Fox
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Black_Fox »

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Pesho
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Pesho »

That blog is awesome, an english version would be very beneficial. I hope i dont have to use google translate for too long:)
Yaraslau
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Yaraslau »

Pesho wrote:That blog is awesome, an english version would be very beneficial. I hope i dont have to use google translate for too long:)
It takes 2-3 seconds to translate from browser Opera. I believe, Firefox also has an option like this.

By the way, blog is really nice (especially about USB!), except some non-translated words in Babelfish. :)
nute
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by nute »

So, where is the project and what is the status of releasing 0.3.12?

The newsletters sadly seem to raise more questions than they answer. The current one talks about gcc assembly intrinsics and then says that this great feature isn't being used. Worse, the discussion of traps etcetera seems to suggest that ReactOS doesn't handle interrupts properly. There is a distinct possibility that USB support is stalled, especially if there is only one person working on that. I don't suspect that explorer-new is going to come out before 0.4.x nor do I suspect that Firefox 3 will render properly yet.

I would like to get the ability to post new topics back, but I guess that privilege is reserved for those who don't annoy the moderators. Public relations sure doesn't seem to be this project's
strong point. I'm obviously not the only person that this project's moderators have a major problem with, so perhaps I'll have company soon.

When will ReactOS be able to use the typical Intel driver? When will USB keyboards like the Logitech MK700 work? When will ReactOS support interrupts, hardware and software, fully?

When will the tired excuse of ReactOS has no time line be replaced by we think we can achieve X by date Y?

The ReactOS 0.3.x series is getting to be quite a long series. I fear there will be many more 0.3.x releases if ReactOS continues to have problems with interrupts and basic USB support. If the team decides to depend on Microsoft Visual C and special features of MSVC, people who are on Linux will have to ask for a binary version of ReactOS I guess or they'll have to compile ReactOS on ReactOS. Can the latter be done yet by the way?

I see in this thread that there is a yearning for progress and a desire from many for more information. That information could be regarding why the developers think ReactOS is a worthwhile effort still and the issue of what motivates people to work on ReactOS or information regarding technical issues. Overall, when things are going to happen is clearly important to many people. Asking when things are going to happen on these forums is difficult and possibly a for sure recipe for getting your new topic posting privilege revoked. Another thing one can't do very effectively
on these forums is criticize for example the decision to make ReactOS work with MSVC. MSVC belongs to Microsoft and is not readily available to people in the Linux community, but one can't
criticize efforts to make ReactOS compile using MSVC without risking loss of posting privileges on these forums.

With all the effort being put into ReactOS so that drivers and software designed for Windows will work without Microsoft Windows, success is very hard to measure. There is another option. One option is to support Syllable, Visopsys, or a variant of Linux. Support software that you want/need that is written using open standards. Support especially adequate programs that are also free. Demand, yes I said demand, software that works on Linux natively. Don't buy hardware that isn't Linux compatible. If enough people do this, Linux will become a better operating system and Linux will gain market share. Microsoft is the standard only because people aren't shaping the market as much as they should be. Too many people look the other way when their OS is chosen
for them partially because they don't know any better and partially because Microsoft has yet to do something so heinous that people start asserting their rights in mass. I think supporting the status quo of Windows NT is a disservice to people. ReactOS has yet to reach the stability and quality of WIndows XP or even Windows 2000 Pro. If ReactOS remains chronically behind feature wise and stability wise, too early to tell, that will not be a good thing.
Angelus
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Re: When does 0.3.12 will come out?

Post by Angelus »

Reading posts like the previous one answers me the question "Why do not developers usually come/read/participate on ROS forums?". More of the same. We already know that. There are a lot of operating systems out there. Commercial, free and/or open source. A lot of them are fully functional to work with. Choose what you want. If someone thinks that "supporting the status quo of Windows NT is a disservice to people" then he/she should avoid projects like this one. And maybe other open source projects based on *nix architecture too. Yes, like Linux.

Everyone can spend their spare time as he wants... as long as he/she respects others. But even more, ROS people (devs, webmasters, moderators, testers, translators, designers,...) are investing that time in a dream and giving it away. For free.
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