March 2016 meeting minutes

by EmuandCo | May 2, 2016

2016-03-31
20:00 UTC
irc.freenode.net, #reactos-meeting

Proceedings

Meeting started at 20:00 by Aleksey Bragin

  • Point 1: Status Reports
  • Point 2: 0.4.1 Release plans
  • Point 3: GSoC

Point 1: Status Reports

[TheFlash]: He's still busy with class projects (pursuing a master's degree) so he hasn't gotten around to working on ReactOS much. He did fix that NTVDM bug though. Once he's done with these projects he can start working on NTVDM VESA support. About rapps_new: he's going to leave it to the students, mostly, but I will give them suggestions about the license filtering like "Show only free software" and "Show freeware and free software" options somewhere.

Aleksey Bragin: His work in March was related to bringing up the new server for ReactOS with Colin, and advertising ReactOS GSoC participation in two big universities here (that raised awareness amongst Russian IT students about ReactOS too). He plans to help Colin as much as he can with the server in the coming month, and potentially work towards ReactOS 0.4.1 release. Aleksandar Rechitskiy really helped with advertising ReactOS GSoC participation and many Russian applications were done thanks to him.

David Quintana: He had no time for ReactOS matters recently, but wanted to mention that he had a job interview a couple weeks ago, and they just told him today they want to have a Skype chat asap, which he guesses is a good sign. He doesn't know whether getting this job will allow him to concentrate again on low-level coding, or will make it impossible yet.

Robert Naumann: He is currently working on CORE-7194 (iernonce). Step 1: get the backend working, based on an old Wine patch by Johan Dahlin. Step 2: Implement the Frontend using the dialog recently added to the code.

Hermes Belusca has nothing really to report since his time is eaten by other stuff, apart from the fact that he's doing "background programming" from time to time, aka. working on pieces of stuff when he has time. But nothing serious. He worked on chkdsk/format during the month of February, too.

Thomas Faber: His no-time-at-all phase has passed for now, so he's been working on getting some of Mark Jansen's and Sylvain Deverre's patches in. He's some more patches on the todo list, then will try to get back to pnp manager locking fixes and FILE_DELETE_ON_CLOSE.

Timo Kreuzer: He didn't do much, except debugging why freeldr didn't work anymore on MSVC builds with /RTC1 and debug a nasty RPCRT4 double free (reported to wine). Next is CORE-9224 (MmGetPhysicalAddress failing)

Samuel SerapiĆ³n: He will have free time soon again and will try to rejoin the testing efforts too.

Point 2: 0.4.1 Release plans

Aleksey Bragin started that topic proposing starting the release process for 0.4.1 ASAP. Now that LDR fixes which did not make it into 0.4 are in trunk sooner is better. As 0.4.1 is not a major step like 0.4 was we can release without the fear of bad reception in public. It will even be positive showing the project is alive and we are progressing faster than before. According to the commits log showing many commits a day from many developers this is true and really fascinates him to see that. However though his own time to spend on ReactOS still is limited by real life projects this hopefully changes soon due to the end of one project. He asks for any proposals regarding release.

Thomas thinks whats needed for a faster release process is the automated app testing progressing further which already is planned. So sorting out the test infrastructure issues would help a lot for this in general. He proposes for starting the release process ASAP, too.

For some testing needs it might be interesting to use both some spare Windows 2003 licenses Christoph offered and if needed some legal MS offered Windows VMs, too: (https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/windows/)

Aleksandar Rechitskiy thinks a UniATA update would be needed first, but agrees that the release should be made soon.

Robert Naumann agress, too. FS improvements are worth a release in his opinion, shell fixes can wait for 0.4.2.

Point 3: GSoC

The project evaluated the gsoc proposals and which and how many slots we will apply for.

Meeting was closed at 22:57 by Aleksey Bragin

Meeting minutes prepared by Daniel Reimer