Community > ReactOS Newsletter Archive > ReactOS Newsletter: Newsletter 47
ReactOS Newsletter - Newsletter 47 (#47)
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by Z98 on 2008-09-28
topGeneral Developments
The developers have been quite busy over the past month, each chugging away at their respective spots. Cameron Gutman continues filling in holes in our networking code, while Ged Murphy is putting together headers for the user mode side of networking. Samuel Serapion and Timo Kreuzer are still working on the x64 branch, fixing compile errors and warnings as they go. We've also had a few discussions with the mingw64 people about what's missing on both ends to get ReactOS to run as a proper x64 OS. Christoph von Wittich has also synced our files with Wine 1.1.5, which should allow for increased compatibility, assuming the underlying systems hold up. Pierre Schweitzer has also imported and synced a few items from Wine that were geared towards making Chrome run, though Chrome still doesn't like ROS very much.
Andrew Munger has actually been running a ReactOS install for about a month now, testing its uptime. Of course, the system isn't sitting idle, as Andrew has been running an IRC client he wrote on it on and off, so we often see that machine in the channel. That's no small feat, considering the issues that have plagued system stability. And let's keep in mind having a month of uptime means he's running a build that's a month old. So if this older build could survive this long, then one can well imagine the state of ReactOS now.
topCoverity Scanning
It's good to have friends. Urias McCullough, a member of the Haiku team that we shared our spot at Linuxworld with, put us in touch with Coverity for submission of the ROS source code and we thank him. After working with Art Yerkes to get Coverity's tools to run within our build environment, the results were submitted and we have our first report. The results: 1,417 bugs reported. These range from buffer overruns, using freed resources, a few resource leaks, and more. The developers are currently working their way down the list, confirming and fixing the issues. You can already see some of the results in the commit logs.
topSysreg
The Sysreg utility has been mentioned before as a way to do automatic regression testing of trunk builds. The original one written by Johannes Anderwald didn't cooperate very well with the build machines run by Christoph von Wittich, so Christoph rewrote it using the libvirt library. While this now allows Sysreg to switch between using different types of virtual machines without needing to be recompiled, it also limits it to running only on Linux systems, since libvirt is *nix only. With Sysreg now working, we can run the winetests for every revision and get a report of the failures and successes, or until a test ends up crashing the system, which happens a bit too often for our liking. New pages have even been added to the CMS to allow people to view the results, though they'll likely be more fleshed out in the future. The next step would be to run the entire rostests suite, not just winetests, though it will likely be a bit before we get to that point.
topAnother New Developer
It's always nice to welcome someone new into the fold, especially one who shows great talent. Michael Martin, known as bugboy in IRC, has been submitting many patches to get ReactOS to pass various winetests that in the past even crashed ROS. Michael would have been granted commit access sooner, but he wanted to have a bit more time settling into working with ROS source code. However, the rest of us are confident he'll make great contributions to the project.
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