[ros-kernel] Press kit & developer kit

[Andrew Greenwood]

Further to my proposal for a "live cd" (or full-blown press kit as Jason
suggested), I had an additional idea.

Basically, the Press Kit would be for magazines, websites - anything that
will feed the hungry minds of potential users or promoters.

In addition to this, there could be a Developer Kit. This would serve
potential developers. The reason this would be beneficial requires an
example.

A friend of mine has recently taken an interest in ReactOS. He'd never used
it or seen it before, and wasn't interested as it didn't have a GUI. He
programs in Delphi, but was keen to tinker with the source code and
basically see what ReactOS can do.

He wanted the latest sources, so I told him where to find TortoiseCVS, and
he figured out the CVS settings for himself.

I directed him to www.mingw.org and he became lost among the download
section. I told him what to get - the latest MinGW tools (can't remember
exact name), Make, GCC 3.3 core and G++ 3.3.

Once these were installed, I sent him NASM, which seems to be needed for
some parts of ReactOS.

After a few problems regarding Borland's own MAKE getting in the way, and
setting the path to include NASM, he finally could compile ReactOS.

Don't think he got round to installing it into Bochs yet though!


So, maybe there could be some sort of "Introduction to ReactOS" development
kit, or basically just something first-time potential developers can grab
that will install all the tools they need. Then later, they can upgrade
individual bits as necessary - or the development kit could be updated to
include the necessary tools.

The kit should include:
- CVS / TortoiseCVS
- MinGW
- Make
- GCC/G++ 3.3
- Latest w32api headers? or are we not using these any more?
- ReactOS source code - or maybe these could be automatically downloaded
from CVS upon installation completion?
- NASM
- Bochs (or qemu?)


IMO, this would make it much easier.

And if the user already has one or more of the above tools installed, maybe
offer to upgrade or install elsewhere? But I know personally that my
projects wont compile with GCC 3.3 so I have 2 copies installed. How would
we handle that?