Road to ReactOS 0.5

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ctasan
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Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ctasan »

After eight releases of 0.4 series (I know, the last one hasn't come yet), I decided to start a topic about upcoming 0.5, as previous "About ReactOS 0.4" topic. ReactOS 0.5 is still a long way, with steady progress. Anyway, let's start to talk and enjoy the journey!

The Big Changelog

Up to 0.4.7 (Updated April 17, 2018)

-Big work was done in kernel. Besides fixing lots of bugs, many progress were achieved in MM and CC. Big features such as lazy writing and read ahead is implemented in CC, with fixing tons of deadlocks. ARM3 also saw some progress. Improved hardware support and adding some filesystems became possible this way. We also got rid of some memory-related bugs, plug-and-play bugs and many crashes. In short, our kernel is still not finished, but more stable.
-Work for EFI/UEFI booting along with SecureBoot has started. ReactOS cannot boot for now, but many stages are implemented.
-Work for x64 boot is being finalized.
-Our bootloader saw some fixes to resolve more booting issues.
-ReactOS Setup was improved for better partitioning. Also some bugs was fixed there. Work for 1st stage GUI setup and many improvements are still ongoing.
-Win32 subsystem was seen much work since 0.4. Many issues like drawing, painting, fonts, non-Latin characters, misalignments were fixed. Lots of missing stuff was implemented and overall, ReactOS is able to run and render much more programs correctly. Many hangs and deadlocks are resolved. ReactOS can run many games now and issues with DirectX are being fixed.
-NT Virtual DOS Machine is improved. VESA support added, and many bugs were fixed. It can even run Windows 3.11!
-Basic printing stack is implemented now, but much more work remains to get it usable.
-Filesystem support is booming. Firstly, big corruptions in FAT32 driver has been fixed, and many bugs in NTFS read support was fixed. Writing on NTFS is still not finished. Besides this, ReiserFS, ext2/3, btrfs, UFS/FFS, NFS support is added. UDFS driver is re-enabled and fixed.
-USB has seen a major revamp, base drivers of USB is rewritten. Work on correcting device support is ongoing. Also, many work for booting from USB is done. A driver for USB audio devices has also started.
-Adding Plug and Play support to many drivers is started.
-AHCI driver and a filter driver has been added. Both are still unfinished.
-Basic drivers has seen major fixes. Disk, floppy, ACPI, sound drivers are more stable. CDFS has been replaced with an MS one.
-System registry is more stable.
-Major progress on DirectX/WineD3D thanks to syncs with Wine.
-Big work was done on our shell. Tons of new functionality (quick launch, notifications, correct drag-and drop support, shell extensions, treeview, basebar, screen fade-out in shutdown, balloon notifications, killing unneccessary icons, relative path, shell autocomplete...) has been implemented. Lots of bugs and leaks were fixed.
-Theming support is revamped and near-complete.
-In kernel32.dll, major work has been done on activation context, file read/write, filenames, NLS, codepages. This improved application support, and .NET support. Also work started on forwards application compatibility.
-In advapi32.dll, many functions were implemented. This will pave way for many things.
-Major work to improve networking: WinSock2 (ws2_32.dll) is rewritten, many TCP/IP and networking leaks were fixed in related DLLs and new functionality is there, mainly SSL support. Fixed many connection problems. Also, major work on netapi32.dll is done for local networking. To enable shared folders, work was done on mpr.dll.
-An application compatibility framework is added, like in Windows XP. It's constructed to enable forward compatibility.
-Many DLLs are synced with Wine.
-Many improvements to accessories, commands and Control Panel applets has been done. RAPPS has been replaced. A debugging tool like Dr. Watson has been added.
Last edited by ctasan on Tue Apr 17, 2018 8:00 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Michael Long
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by Michael Long »

One thing I was thinking about when I thought about new releases of ReactOS is the problem the Debian developers have run into:
There are more bugs reported for Debian in a time span than there are resolved. This caused the situation that bugs are being reported 2 times, 3 times 5 times, ... Maybe because the bug tracker is bursting, people don't find the bugs anymore. There are just way too many. So dozens and dozens of duplicates get flushed into the bug tracker. There are more than 80k bugs in the bug tracker of Debian and the number is rising and rising.

They have a nice graphic for this:
[ external image ]

With ReactOS it's not as bad as it is with Debian yet. But for example, if you open JIRA and search for unresolved bugs regarding USB then you will find about 200 bug reports. There are quite a lot of duplicates. USB seems to be a big desire at the moment but developers can't deliver fast enough. So we already got the situation in a small scale.

But I have no idea how to avoid such a situation especially considering that 0.5 probably means new features and new features probably mean new bugs. 0.5 probably also means more popularity and more popularity means more users and with that more bug reporters.

Edit: Thank you middings for correcting my spelling errors. I really need to learn better English.
ctasan
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ctasan »

A good point, many members discussed about it in another thread.

Now. My cents on 0.5: I want to see full gaming support up to DirectX 9.0c on ReactOS, without bugs. Want to be able to play TONS of old games. This will be done step by step, eventually. With a stable system, actually :)

Let's not talk in just a single way, instead, multiple ways.
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ROCKNROLLKID
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ROCKNROLLKID »

ctasan wrote:A good point, many members discussed about it in another thread.

Now. My cents on 0.5: I want to see full gaming support up to DirectX 9.0c on ReactOS, without bugs. Want to be able to play TONS of old games. This will be done step by step, eventually. With a stable system, actually :)

Let's not talk in just a single way, instead, multiple ways.
You could try this: *removed*
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Adcock
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by Adcock »

ROCKNROLLKID wrote:[...] You could try this: *removed*
Nice. Thank you.
:mrgreen:
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ctasan
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ctasan »

I'm aware of this (along with broken installer :D). Looking forward for future DirectX work.
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ctasan
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ctasan »

Changelog is updated. Check out here from release to release!
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ROCKNROLLKID
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ROCKNROLLKID »

Wait, I am confused. Is this a historical changelog or a changelog for .5 version? I thought most of the UEFI/AHCI/plug and play support was already merged with the recent versions?

Also, do you think they will restart ReactOS Community Edition and do another fundraiser and have another vote of important features to be added with ReactOS .5, like they did with .4?
ctasan
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Re: Road to ReactOS 0.5

Post by ctasan »

This will be a changelog of 0.4 to 0.5, for showing what's been done in the last stage of Alpha.

Community Edition? Good question. I am also one of the people haven't heard about it for a long time. In a point of unknown, CE will come. People have donated for it. Don't be afraid though, da money must have been used in contracts (at that time, new shell) to bring 0.4. Also, as you may have seen, many concepts are out there. Strangely, there is NO update in CE website. So... can't make a guess *SYSTEM FAILURE* :D
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