February 2016 meeting minutes

by EmuandCo | March 27, 2016

2015-11-26
19:30 UTC
irc.freenode.net, #reactos-meeting

Proceedings

Meeting started at 19:33 by Aleksey Bragin

  • Point 1: Status Reports
  • Point 2: Website Reports
  • Point 3: 0.4.1 and 0.5.0 Release plans

Point 1: Status Reports

[TheFlash]: He'll work on the ntvdm bugs he took over in jira and after that he'll help with rapps_new. He's pretty much given up on writing NTVDM sound card drivers for now due to licensing problems he can't bypass and/or combine with his ideals.

Aleksey Bragin: After he fixed the obvious flaws in the activation context code there is some stuff remaining to be fixed, as it's too different from Windows implementation, however he's doing his best to make it compatible instead of reverting back to purely Wine's implementation. He's going to check through the open bugs referring to actctx problems and fix them, if possible by 0.4.1.

Amine Khaldi: He was focusing on getting 0.4.0 out along with the awesome website (thanks to Victor and co) and now that they did it it's time to plan 0.4.1 and CE and he already started the Wine sync work. That, in addition to his usual tasks of maintaining jira, trying to get us forward by helping with anything he can ...etc

Daniel Reimer: He will have a bit more time soon, so his next task is RAPPS DB and some more reports he assigned to himself + booth @ CLT 2016.

Ged Murphy: He was too busy these days with being a dad for his newborn (Once more congratulations from our side!!)

Hermes Belusca-Maito: Now he has some more free time he's trying to implement some CD layout optimization in CDMAKE (ie. removing file duplicates; making files pointing into others etc... so there's nice algorithmics taking place there). He also wants to clear up a bit his assigned list. When [TheFlash] will start to play with rapps_new he'll then have a look, too.

Sylvain Petreolle: He's looking at sound and floppy access now, but he lacks free time.

Victor Martinez: He's planning to show reactos in "OpenExpo" in Madrid again in June. Rest can be seen in Point 2.

Point 2: Website Reports

The report of Victor Martinez regarding website status and things left todo:

His idea is fixing the rest of the issues regarding the website.

1. As you know the new site needs the Recaptcha thingy. He can place the Drupal Project recaptcha in the website but he needs first permission from sysadmins and they evaluating if it is a good one. Probably combined also with HoneyPot as Ziliang suggested would be more than enough to stop the spammers. That is the most urgent fix for the site. Also he will be reworking the menu for the mobile phones and preparing internationalization, but it will take a while. So his work will be website, website and website.

2. Regarding Brandon Turner memorial. Seems a close friend of Brandon Turner saw our in memorian and she talked to his parents. Seems they really appreciate this detail and they have sent us an email thanking us. Brandon passed away 3 years ago so they are really touched.

3. He was willing to fix several CID issues, because he is really fed up of html/css/bootstrap

4. Donations. We have received a couple of donations, He doesn't know the sum yet... But we have several recurrent donors included. So the agressiveness seemed to work. Donation bar still is not really working though.

5. We have that Hosting issue, maybe we can contact a company willing to host our server in exchange of a beautiful banner in frontpage. Otherwise we need a solution ASAP.

Some voices regarding the website were: The "no thanks" button is hard to see on the donation page, which is part of the Honeypot and some a bit more aggresive donation asking. Victor asked for more access to the site, too, because something as stupid as removing a .js file or sending a .css commit takes ages if the sysadmins can't push the change.

Point 3: 0.4.1 and 0.5.0 Release plans

Three apps need a working state for future versions. Java (working already), Chrome (Not working even on Wine yet) and Word (Working to an extent, but not flawless yet). For Word and Chrome we need SxS working, too. Same for proper theming support. Syscalls in ReactOS should work with Chrome's sandbox features, but we suffer the same problem Wine has right now. (https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39403) The same bug affects Steam Browser, too. To be aware of regressions of any of the most important apps, we need to improve our testing suite to do auto tests of these, too. Like all OpenJDK tests and maybe Eclipse/Netbeans for Java. Problem here is some new hardware needed for these tests. This will be tackled later.

Most notable change in 0.4.X will be the new release way: "Release early, release often" meaning that 0.4.1 already is in planning stage. That way we try to get the question "Is this project dead?" resolved, too. First step for 0.4.1 will be a Wine sync, then testing the main apps, fixing blockers and then release.

Next point todo is patch reviewing in Jira. Many good patches are waiting for a review and are rotting in there right now. This has to change!

For 0.5.0 goals Robert Naumann made a summary I would like to share with you:

For Alpha quality software it is fine to have no real roadmap, but for Beta we have to change that. Beta has some minimum aquirements that should fit and thus we have to get past the hobby mentality a bit. Otherwise we will stay Alpha quality for another decade which is way too long. Beta goals need to be summarized and assigned to devs to cope with them. Even boring and complicated things.

Short said: We need a roadmap, strict targets, and someone who works on this. Some points would be:

  • Getting default software flawlessly to run (at least one browser, office suite, multimediaplayer, document viewer, etc)
  • Finishing printing support
  • Finishing wifi implementation and add a graphical frontend
  • Kill almost all bugs in our 3 common virtualization tools
  • Minimize the probability to get a BSOD
  • Finishing the shell. (Toolbars, loading/saving settings, etc)
  • Extend USB support to use more than storage/HID devices (most important are printers, WIFI, 3G sticks)
  • Remove almost every graphical glitches and bugs
  • Fix MM/CC as is a source of evil regarding all of this points
  • Same for WIN32SS
  • A bonus would be to audit our forked wine code for possible improvements, unneeded or duplicated code

Meeting was closed at 21:38 by Aleksey Bragin

Meeting minutes prepared by Daniel Reimer