ReactOS Meeting Minutes

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ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by vicmarcal »

ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Monthly a ReactOS Meeting is held in order to share, discuss, and decide about the most important ReactOS Project points. It takes place the last Thursday of each month, and a public call is done through the ReactOS Development Mailing List.

EDIT: Discussion, questions, opinions should be done in the following thread: «Discussion: ReactOS Meeting Minutes».

Each month a ReactOS Meeting Minutes is created and posted through the ros-dev mailing list and «General Discussion» ReactOS forum which sums up the meeting.

2011
  • May Minutes: link
  • June Minutes: link
  • July Minutes: vacations
  • August Minutes: link
  • September Minutes: link
  • October Minutes: link
  • Postponed November Minutes: link
2012
  • Postponed December 2011 Minutes: link
  • February Minutes: link
  • March Minutes: link
  • April Minutes: link
  • May Minutes: link
  • July Meeting A Minutes: link
  • July Meeting B Minutes: link
  • August Minutes: link
  • September Minutes: link
  • October Minutes: link
  • November Minutes: link
  • December Minutes: holidays
2013
  • January Minutes: link
  • February Minutes: link
Last edited by Ged on Thu Apr 12, 2018 11:56 pm, edited 6 times in total.
Reason: It's very outdated. No reasons to be a sticky
vicmarcal
Test Team
Posts: 2733
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 12:35 pm

Re: ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by vicmarcal »

May Meeting Minutes

2011-05-26
20:05 UTC
Freenode, #reactos-meeting

Participants
=============
- Aleksey Bragin
- Art Yerkes
- Cameron Gutman
- Claudiu Mihail
- Colin Finck
- Gabriel Ilardi
- Ged Murphy
- Giannis Adamopoulos
- James Tabor
- Jan Blomqvist Kinander
- Javier Agustìn Fernàndez Arroyo
- Johannes Anderwald
- Kamil Hornicek
- Maciej Bialas
- Matthias Kupfer
- Neeraj Yadav
- Olaf Siejka
- Pierre Schweitzer
- Rafal Harabien
- Samuel Serapion
- Sylvain Petreolle
- Thomas Faber
- Timo Kreuzer
- Victor Martinez
- Ziliang Guo

Proceedings
============
○ Meeting called to order at 20:05 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.

○ Point 1: Status of our GSoC participation
--------------------------------------------
■ ReactOS' GSoC administrator Ged Murphy gave a quick update about
individual participants:
- Timo Kreuzer is way ahead of the timeline and already has his
font driver working under Windows. He later showed these
screenshots:
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/156/ftfd.png/
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/5/roxxc.png/
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/22 ... ening.png/
* http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/199/ie1d.png/

The major remaining work is implementing the appropriate interface
to make the font driver usable under ReactOS.

- Giannis Adamopoulos is also progressing well and has already
committed a lot of code regarding theming. He later showed these
screenshots:
* http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/8500/theme2.png
* http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9660/theme3v.png
* http://img691.imageshack.us/img691/7425/theme1c.jpg

- Thomas Faber, who works on the kernel-mode test suite, has been
pretty quiet so far, but is considered a trustworthy person who
knows what he is doing and does not need much help from the
community.

- Claudiu Mihail is considered a great student who is always
available on IRC and often asking questions. His lwIP driver is
progressing well, although he agrees that there is still much
work left.

- Andrew Green has taken the task to complete our new Explorer, but
there were a few issues with what he thought he was doing and what
we wanted from him. He assumed he had to work on the explorer_new
application itself while we actually need work done on related
components like shell32 and browseui. Ged thinks he might have
underestimated the workload a little, so some help from the
community might be required. This is also why Ged has begun to
work on shell32 himself and merge the latest changes with the C++
code by Andrew Hill.

Ged explicitly asks for more developers to join these efforts.
It would be great if these people had experiences with COM,
although this could also be a nice task for developers who want
to learn a bit about COM.

○ Point 2 (added): Neeraj Yadav's participation in GSoC
--------------------------------------------------------
■ Ged Murphy gave a quick background on what happened regarding Neeraj
Yadav, who was meant to work on the Audio Mixer project:
- After Google announced the project, Neeraj Yadav disappeared for
4 weeks and was not reachable by E-Mail or IRC.
- Ged has spoken to Carol Smith from Google afterwards, who
mentioned that some students waited for the first payment and then
fled.
- After a lot of discussion, it was necessary to inform Google that
we had lost a student.
- Ged has written some very apologetic mails to Google afterwards,
and they were pretty understanding.
- He has especially emphasized that this was a very bad time for us
and made the project looking incompetent. Apart from him, Amine
Khaldi and Johannes Anderwald (his mentor) were very angry about
this as well.
- Two days after these mails, Neeraj Yadav reappeared on IRC.
■ Neeraj Yadav said he was really sorry about his mistake, but also
explained his actions:
- He mentioned that his case was actually the opposite of what
Google might assume: While some students keep in contact with the
organisation until they get their first payment, he actually
disappeared during the community bonding period, but was available
again on the first day when coding started.
- His sudden absence occurred, because he needed to move to his
brother who lives in a remote place with no internet connectivity.
■ Ged again emphasized that a wrong decision on this can affect our
further participation in Google's Summer of Code project.
■ After a long discussion, it was decided that this matter requires a
private conversation between Johannes Anderwald and Ged Murphy and a
final decision needs to be taken by them.

Please note that this is a very shortened version of the discussion and
you should not build an opinion about the issue just from this information.

○ Point 3 (added): Changes in the meeting organisation
-------------------------------------------------------
■ Victor Martinez proposed to create a list of E-Mail addresses of
ReactOS Members, who are then informed one week before the meeting takes
place.
- This idea was immediately rejected by Aleksey Bragin and Samuel
Serapion, because we have the ros-dev mailing list for this.
- Victor Martinez then proposed that someone at least sends a mail
to ros-dev one week in advance. Colin Finck, Gabriel Ilardi, Jan
Blomqvist Kinander and Pierre Schweitzer agreed to this.
- Colin Finck proposed that Aleksey Bragin could take this job.
Aleksey Bragin agreed.
■ Jan Blomqvist Kinander asked whether we could already begin at 19:00
UTC. This required a voting between all participants (excluding the
people who only came to us through GSoC). As Colin Finck has not fixed
the IRC server with voting capabilities yet, the voters were publicly
asked about their opinion. Result:
- 17 positive votes
- 1 abstention
- 0 negative votes

The remaining participants were not available and did not vote. Even
without them, this result shows that we have a clear simple majority, so
further meetings will begin at 19:00 UTC.

○ Point 4: Current ReactOS work, Developers reporting their status
-------------------------------------------------------------------
■ Aleksey Bragin had a busy month, which began by giving a technical
lecture about ReactOS at Prague's technical university in the faculty of
informatics. It was received quite well with enough of interesting
questions. Afterwards, he moved to Berlin to join Matthias at our
LinuxTag booth. He describes the event as a very crowded and well
advertised one. On top of this, the ReactOS booth was located quite
close to the entrance, so we received a lot of visitors. Despite
LinuxTag being Europe's biggest Open-Source event, 99% of the incoming
people were German, so Matthias had to handle most of them.
Regarding ReactOS development, Aleksey is still working on his LDR
rewrite and fixed a few of the blocker bugs. There is still one serious
problem left until he can commit the rewrite to Trunk and gradually
improve it there, which should be done much faster. When this is done
and there are no new regressions left, he wants to perform a full Wine sync.
■ Art Yerkes has spent most time working on DWARF symbols. He made slow
progress towards reading the arguments off the stack as described by the
DWARF debug information. After Colin Finck asked, he also reported about
NewCC being in the same state as before, namely still requiring
performance improvements and regression testing until it can be merged
back to Trunk.
■ Cameron Gutman has been doing work on the PnP manager involving hot
swapping devices (like implementing device ejection, surprise removal,
etc.). He is almost done with his implementation of
IoRequestDeviceEject. The code is currently unused, but the USB work
might be a good testcase for it.
■ Colin Finck has returned to Germany two weeks ago and has been busy
with (mostly routine) foundation and server work. He is also relocating
in August, so he might be missing time for ReactOS work afterwards. For
now, his list basically inclues three ReactOS-related points:
- Fixing the bug in the IRC server we used for the March meeting
- Starting work on "RosBE 2.0" (certainly together with dreimer),
which also includes establishing fixed build tool versions for the
big CMake rollout
- Helping with the big website revamp
■ Gabriel Ilardi is quite busy lately, so he is mainly following the
forum and contributed some bitmaps for logonui.
■ Giannis Adamopoulos is exclusively working on the Theming task for GSoC.
■ Ged Murphy as our GSoC administrator has been pretty busy with related
work. However, he has recently started to work on the conversion of
shell32 to C++ and just finished merging back all changes from the C
version. He especially wants to thank Andrew Hill for his first work on
the C++ version and in particular his ATL headers, which give us a true
OO COM implementation. Additionally, he has started work on a logonui
module, but this is just a fun project for now. Finally, he has a
partially working NTFS driver, but this project is currently put on hold.
■ James Tabor is researching bug reports and building a list of related
issues and problems in the server-side window procedures. As we
currently do not have a functional screensaver, he is also trying to fix
this.
■ Jan Blomqvist Kinander is planning a new burglar-proof server bunker
fire cell at his workplace and will move our Fezile server (currently
hosting Doxygen and ISO Storage) there. He is also planning to make room
for a LAN behind the Fezile server, which we could use for automatic
tests on real hardware.
■ Johannes Anderwald is teaming with Michael Martin to develop the USB
stack. The current goal is to bring a working USB mass storage stack to
ReactOS. From this perspective, the goal is already reached for USB 2.0.
Today, he also got OHCI 1.1 mass storage support working and added some
fixes for keyboard/mice support in the USBOHCI driver. This still
requires proper HID support in a higher class driver though. The next
goals probably include UHCI support and synchronizing the work with
Cameron's PnP fixes and Pierre's Mount Manager work.
■ Kamil Hornicek has been arranging Aleksey's speech in Prague, but did
not have time for other ReactOS-related work. If anybody has an
interesting side project, he is willing to find some spare time for it
though.
■ Maciej Bialas hopes to get back to working on our new website in the
next one or two weeks. He has lately been setting up a local Bugzilla
and evaluated its authentication capabilities when combined with Drupal CMS.
■ Matthias Kupfer has been attending our LinuxTag booth for all three
days and is now working on a lot of "end-user-visible" parts in his
spare time. Since LinuxTag, he has started with the internationalization
of registry entries and small changes like adding the progress bar back
to FreeLdr. Besides, he also does routine work for the German ReactOS
foundation.
■ Olaf Siejka has been working on testing and pushing patches (as
reported by Gabriel Ilardi). He also reported that the CMake/MSVC builds
are now compiled from Trunk, but he needs to reinstall his Buildslave
with Windows 7 SP1 and thinks about buying a fast SSD for it. Finally,
he is in the middle of converting Polish resources to UTF-8 and perform
some cleanup and style corrections in the process.
■ Rafal Harabien has been busy with real life issues lately, but plans
to fix our cursors implementation in Win32k soon and clipboards afterwards.
■ Samuel Serapion is writing code for NTLM authentication stuff and will
move to the MSV1_0 and LSA modules afterwards. He referred to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 85%29.aspx for
explanations about what these modules are used for.
■ Timo Kreuzer is exclusively working on the FreeType font driver for GSoC.
■ Victor Martinez has been presenting ReactOS at small Spanish
conferences about Open-Source in Seville and Huelva (again) before he
joined Aleksey and Matthias at LinuxTag in Berlin. Lately, he has been
modifying the Testing Central Wiki page, where the GoldenApps now point
to the Compatibility Database. Finally, he plans to establish a real
Testing Team (mainly from Forum users) together with Olaf.
■ Ziliang Guo has been working on several things like building and
verifying the drivers which are going to be signed with the ReactOS
Foundation certificate. He is also testing out a new MSI installer for
RosBE-Windows. His work towards the website overhaul is currently on
hold, because he first needs to install some more modules.

○ Meeting closed at 22:36 UTC by Colin Finck on behalf of Aleksey Bragin.
○ Minutes written by Colin Finck.
vicmarcal
Test Team
Posts: 2733
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 12:35 pm

Re: ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by vicmarcal »

June Meeting Minutes

2011-06-28
19:05 UTC
Fezile IRC Server, #meeting

Participants
=============
- Jan_Blomqvist_Kinander
- Igor_Paliychuk
- MfldElton
- Usurp
- Aleksey_Bragin
- Thomas_Faber
- Giannis_Adamopoulos
- Thomas_Faber
- Johannes_Anderwald
- Timo_Kreuzer
- Olaf_Siejka
- Jerome_Gardou
- Gabriel_Ilardi
- Andrew_Green
- Javier_Fernandez
- Victor_Martinez
- Amine_Khaldi
- Claudiu_Mihail
- Colin_Finck
- Rafal_Harabien
- Sylvain_Petreolle
- Matthias_Kupfer
- Danny_Goette
- Maciej_Bialas
- Ged_Murphy
- Ziliang_Guo
- Art_Yerkes
- Cameron_Gutman
- Neeraj_Yadav
- Herve_Poussineau
- Daniel_Reimer
- James_Tabor
- Olaf_Siejka
- Samuel_Serapion
- Pierre_Schweitzer
- Alex_Ionescu
- Gabriel_Ilardi

Proceedings
============
○ Meeting called to order at 19:05 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.
○ ReactOS Project coordinator Aleksey Bragin listed the points of the proposed agenda for June meeting:
1. Cmake switching
2. Next ReactOS release
3. Website revamp status
4. GSoC status
5. Developers status reports
The Minute Taker rol was given to Victor_Martinez for this meeting.

○ Point 1: CMake switching
--------------------------------------------
■ The ReactOS developer Timo gave a quick sum up about CMake status:
He reported that the CMake build is more or less ready, currently missing rosapps. He stated that rosapps are not a major problem as they're rarely used, and cmake files for them can be done if needed.
He also mentioned a problem, confirmed by Igor_Paliychuk, related to booting in real hardware, in addition to the winmm:mci regression.
The problem detected in real hardware is very specific to the hardware combination thus hard to test.
■ Amine mentioned that several comparative tests have been done through buildbot/testman between the rbuild build and the CMake build, showing no measurable differences. He also stated that the CMake port shouldn't be considered done yet, as it still lacks many planned features.
He highlighted some of the CMake patches,made by Jerome, to be sent upstream, like the PCH support and its related dependency tracking, and also the benefits of using CMake to compile ros, like the improved performance, the small disk space needed for builds (half of what the rbuild builds require) and the cool new kdbg features.Gabriel_Ilardi expressed his concers about merging more code in the current trunk situation. Timo replied that no code merge is needed,in case of switching to Cmake.
■ Timo, Colin and Aleksey asked about measuring the CMake build performance over the rbuild build in numbers. Jerome performed a quick benchmark:
First test: makex ntoskrnl (all clean, toold already built). Cmake: 04:06 , Rbuild: 04:55 (17% faster)
Second test: rebuild (only dependencies check). Cmake: 0:28 , Rbuild: 1:04 (56% faster)
The benchmark shows Cmake is faster not only for a full compilation but also recompiling (ntoskrnl) modules.
■ The ReactOS Cmake Team suggested to begin using Cmake with current RosBE to compile ReactOS ISOs in order to assure they are as good as Rbuild’s.
A "How to compile with Cmake" tutorial can be found in the following wikipage: http://reactos.org/wiki/Cmake
Summing up, the Cmake switch will bring better dependency checking, fast rebuild of single modules and much better symbols support in kdbg according to the ReactOS Cmake Team
The technical description was left to be discussed in #reactos-dev, if anyone was interested.

○ Point 2 : Next ReactOS release
--------------------------------------------------------
¦ReactOS release was the 2nd point of the June meeting agenda.

■ Gabriel_Ilardi and Victor_Martinez were asked to report current trunk state from Compatibility/Stability point of view.
Accordingly to forum threads, Bugzilla new entries, and Own testing,Gabriel and Victor said important regressions have been introduced due the latest changes, and mainly the LDR rewrite.
Wrong icons, impossibility to shutdown, AC97 hang, several installers/apps failing are some of those important regressions.
■ Art_Yerkes has been giving a look at the AC97 bug, he was able to gather a lot of information about the regression and asks for collaboration to fix it.
■ Aleksey_Bragin, as the author of the LDR rewrite, stated that he knew the new LDR could introduce regressions but that it is a big step forward.
The top priority is fixing those LDR regressions, instead of reverting, as the old LDR was indeed worse.
Aleksey remarks that he needs every dev to take a look at the LDR bugs and try to fix them.
The LDR regressions should be really easy to fix thanks to the rewrite, he said.
■ Amine_Khaldi suggested to decide when it is time to release performing bugfixing and full regression testing.
■ The idea of performing full regression tests now was inmediatly rejected by Colin_Finck and Olaf_Siejka since bug reports are currently showing that our trunk is in a really bad shape. Due to this, the Release discussion will be on hold until the next meeting.
During this month ReactOS devs are suggested to focus in bugfixing mainly the LDR code.
As these bugs are critical and able to hide other minors regressions, a special call is being made:

****************Special Call****************
"Please pick a bug from the linked ones in http://reactos.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6346 "
****************Special Call****************

○ Point 3 : Website Revamp Status
-------------------------------------------------------
¦ Thanks to Colin's help, a new playground with correct permissions and tied to an SVN branch has been created.

■ Niski and aross, main webrevamp developers, have been focused on Bugzilla and Mediawiki integration, compatdb drupal port, and forum.
Forum will have new features as "the best answer" and "karma" modules which will improve forum users experience.
■ Niski has completed the work on Bugzilla and Mediawiki while aross is working on compatdb and the new forum.
■ Right now, Amine said, a design/layout work is needed in parallel.
■ Colin_Finck stated that finding a designer among ReactOS developers is more difficult than findind a developer so he offered himself to help with the design/layout.

○ Point 4: Gsoc status
-------------------------------------------------------------------
■ AndrewGreen is currently cleaning a mixture of explorer_new, atl com and browseui code. The resultant code will be commited afterwards.
Although he recognizes his project is behind schedule, after apologizing he says he’s confident to meet the goals by midsemester evaluation.
Ged_Murphy cpp shell32 code will allow him to use atl com for everything shell related.
Colin_Finck and Olaf_Siejka discussed the best way to test the new implementation to check for any possible regressions, due to the fact that Ged was not around the discussion was postponed.
Jerome_Gardou asked Andrew about the WINE Shell32 Gsoc project but accordingly to Olaf, Wine has refused to cooperate regarding those.
Status: Behind Schedule.

■ Giannis_Adamopoulos was too busy with exams so his project was parked a little. His commits will raise up when the last exam is done.
Status: On time

■ Claudiu_Mihail thanked the great help of Cameron_Gutman and Art_Yerkes. The project is set to meet the deadlines for midterm.
There are still two problems remaining: browsers don't work(it will be solved by midterms), slowness of the lwIP implementation.
He has followed the test approach using several simple test apps and fixing revealed bugs.
After finishing his thesis project, which is highly related to his Gsoc project,he will start commiting again.

■ Neeraj_Yadav has divided his sound project in 5 parts.
1.[Finished] Writing a skeleton server which can hold the audio converter modules and the mixer modules ...This server should be capable of insertion in the reactos audio chain [4 weeks]
2.[Now] Writing mixer modules [2 weeks]
3.Writing audio converter [ 4 weeks]
4.Inserting this audio server in the reactos audio chain [1 week]
5.testing/styling/documentation [1 week]
He expects to finish the 2nd step in midterm evaluation.
Alex_Ionescu and Giannis_Adamopoulos asked for a way to test Neeraj code.
If anyone is interested, this is the best way:
1)make audsrv && make audclient
2)run audsrv -n in one console
3)run audclient in other
4)open as many audclients as you want
5)the server should play a mixed sound
Status: On time

■ Thomas_Faber is finishing the main framework needed to run the tests. Most of the old tests have been ported and now he is currently working on getting special-purpose drivers and usermode test parts up and running.
Lately he has been quite busy with a university project but he expects to commit the framework in these days.
Status: On time

■ Timo_Kreuzer has finished the font driver loading and now he is working on the font mapper, which is complex and needs a good design.
Status: Ahead of time


○ Point 5: Developers status reports
-------------------------------------------------------------------
■ Alex_Ionescu will help Aleksey commit his scater/gather DMA patch.
■ Alex_Bragin is working on remaining LDR code and afterwards he'll take part in processing bugzilla patches.
■ Amine_Khaldi is focused in cmake and the website revamp.
■ Art_Yerkes made some improvements to symbol handling in the cmake branch and now he’s working with Claudiu.
■ Colin_Finck has been trying the KDUSBCOM idea (KD DLL for debugging over an USB-to-Serial adapter), and he’s moving now to help with the website layout.
■ Daniel_Reimer is playing with Gcc builds and updating RosBE.He added Cmake support a while ago and he is still battling with GCC 4.6 and Wine RC files.
■ Gabriel_Ilardi is focused in mantaining Bugzilla and the forum and he’s performing some testing in his few spare time.
■ Ged_Murphy is helping with shell32 c++ fixup
■ Herve_Poussineau is currently inactive on ReactOS
■ James_Tabor is still working on bug report issues.
■ Jan_Blomqvist_Kinander will move the Fezile server to the concrete bunker creating a LAN behind Fezile to get automated tests on real hardware.
■ Johannes Anderwald will work in HID (Human Interface Devices for USB) support during the summer, a hard task as it is completly undocumented.
■ Maciej_Bialas is working on mediawiki integration for the new revamped site.
■ Matthias_Kupfer has been bugfixing and commiting some patches.
■ Pierre_Schweitzer has no time nor willingness right now. Once time will be back,he'll invest it in his summer student.Once willingness will be back, he'll keep on his current ReactOS work and help with the ReactOS infrastructure
■ Olaf_Siejka is waiting for Aleksey to finish the LDR code so he can team up with him to solve the remaining issues of sysreg4. After finishing the utf-8 resource conversion, he will get more involved in testing. He will also help with the hardware testbot from the buildbot side.
■ Sylvain_Petreolle is working on French translations.
■ Timo_Kreuzer is working on MSVC builds fixing several bugs that prevent ReactOS to reach the desktop.
■ Victor_Martinez has finished his exams recently and now he’s preparing a forum team to test the revision before the LDR rewrite and the one after it, this way it'll be easier to find regressions. Also he will help with the revamp webpage.

○ Point 6: Suggestions
---------------------------
■ Jan_Blomqvist_Kinander suggested to create a ReactOS annual bootcamp with devs, testers and fanatics plus having a look at SAMBA 4 - ROS port

○ Meeting closed at 22:08 UTC by Colin Finck on behalf of Aleksey Bragin.
○ Minutes written by Víctor Martínez.
○ Reviewed by Amine_Khaldi, and Gabriel_Ilardi
Z98
Release Engineer
Posts: 3379
Joined: Tue May 02, 2006 8:16 pm
Contact:

Re: ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by Z98 »

All kinds of things happen behind the scenes during the day to day operation of the project, many of the isolated between specific groups of devs and others shared between all the devs and the general community/public. Not all of it is relevant to people outside of the ones directly working on it, even if some have major ramifications for the entire project. There are decisions/discussions that are blacked out entirely from the public and will remain so for the entirety of the project, even to contributors that join later on. These things will happen, and pressing us on them is not going to make us cooperative, nor endear you to us, because it is implying one of two things. The first possibility is you are effectively claiming you do not trust us to judge when information should remain sensitive. The second is you believe yourself to be privileged and therefore are entitled to know information the project has deemed should not be released to the general public.

The last meeting was requested to be closed and no one gave much thought to how to scrub the contents for a public version of the minutes before the meeting itself. Thus no one on the team paid it any mind until people on the forum asked about the meeting. It's been one day since I went back to the logs to see if any provision had been made, and the closest thing was a half-joking comment by Aleksey suggesting I do it, which is why between the time the first inquiry about the meeting came in and my checking of the logs, we had incoherent answers about whether the meeting minutes would be released. Since that time, I have been busy with work and classes, meaning the time I've had to prepare a summary has been limited, especially since the meeting was two weeks ago and I barely remember the details of the discussions. One could argue that our disorganized response was a form of rudeness to the community, and I would even agree. But now that an actual response has been made and it has been stated a summary would be provided, I am having trouble accepting the idea that we are continuing to be rude to the community after only a SINGLE day has passed.

The final thing regarding your claim that we are ignoring you. This is an oft-repeated thing, but apparently we haven't done it enough recently. If you want to directly interact with the major decision makers of this project, get on IRC. Quite a few developers outright avoid the forums or only drop in if there's trouble. If you feel you have a major point, then why are you trusting us to be somehow be your proxy or advocate? If you want the major decision makers to take note of your point, you have to take it to them directly. The forum does not work as a medium to do so. Note that past arguments that devs should frequent the forum more has accomplished absolutely nothing. The ones that avoid the forum continue to avoid it and quite a few that did visit the forum have dropped back their participation considerably.

Anyway, the (brief) summary people keep asking for. These were the decisions that were made during the meeting. I am redacting the discussions behind them due to no clear guidelines on what participants wish to be released, as the purpose of holding the entire meeting behind closed doors was so that people could speak their mind on all topics.

A proposal was made to do winesyncs before a release to force the project to do a better job keeping things in sync and perhaps do a better job making syncs feasible/less time consuming. Rejected by plurality of votes.
Questions about how/whether to continue the driver signing program was raised. An advisory vote was held and the majority wished to continue it in one form or another. Feedback based on the advisory vote was incorporated into revised guidelines posted on the Driver Signing wiki page. New projects are now required to find a sponsor ReactOS "core developer" willing to audit their code if they wish to get their driver signed.
Decision to integrate arwinss into trunk under a separate directory structure and make it a compile-time option. Passed by majority vote.
Decision to switch main Linux build server to use cmake. Passed by majority vote.

No status reports were done to save time.
hto
Developer
Posts: 2193
Joined: Sun Oct 01, 2006 3:43 pm

Post by hto »

September Summary

Agenda

1. CMake Adoption Status
2. Release Preparation, Determination of Release Date
3. Webportal Upgrade Status
4. ReactOS Target Version

Report

1. The build environments for both Windows and Unix have gone through several release candidates and are effectively finalized. For the Windows BE an installer release client using MSI instead of NSIS also needs to be prepared. Minor problems still seem to exist on Mac OS X when using a combination of GCC and LLVM, but these were deemed non-blockers. Building ReactOS using CMake has been reported to take more time than using rbuild, though developers are still working to verify and determine the cause.

Current theory is related to changed debug format and more thorough dependency checking by CMake. At present the plan is to put the build environment release candidates on the Linux build servers and determine if there are any problems. The Windows build servers have already been running the new build environments for testing purposes.

2. Due to the significant number of regressions and overall bugginess of ReactOS' current state, release scheduling has been deferred until the next meeting. A list of regressions and bugs has already been compiled and the team intends to work its way through the reported issues in the meantime. At the next meeting, the OS' state will be re-assessed to see whether a release is viable or not.

3. Most of the modules needed to bridge Drupal with things like Bugzilla have already been completed. To speed the transition, a decision was made to retain the current website design. Once the transition is complete, the web team can go back to updating the site's theme. Desired content changes will also not block transition to the new backend. No timetable was given for when the transition would happen.

4. For a while the project adopted the goal of targeting the Windows 2003 kernel and the latest version of Windows for user mode components. Several developers however raised objections to this and presented examples where this methodology does not work. A specific example involved symbolic link support, which required Microsoft rearchitecture not only NTFS but also the kernel's security systems. Its addition in ReactOS, assuming it is done correctly, would require changes to the kernel to adopt features from the Vista kernel, thus violating the kernel target. With these considerations, the project has decided to set both the user and kernel targets to Windows 2003. Dependency on Wine for many user mode libraries actually complicates this, as Wine has been adding Vista and later APIs without proper segregation and the developers will need to figure out how to deal with this in the long run.
hto
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Post by hto »

October Minutes by Claudiu Mihail

20:20 Aleksey Bragin called the meeting to order
■ Aleksey Bragin shared a video interview about ReactOS at http://alenapopova.ru/egov/react-os-kra ... stemy.html
■ Aleksey Bragin stated the meeting agenda as being:
1. Website revamp status
2. CMake adoption
3. Release status

1. Website Revamp
■ Amine Khaldi started on the Website revamp status and stated that unfortunately nothing has progressed since the last meeting because of aross, superdog and nisky being extremely busy.
■ He also stated that Aleksey has yet to commit the bridges needed and that the actual milestone is the theme (i.e. design/layout that matches the current website), after which devs will need to investigate phpbb issue.
■ Aleksey Bragin added that almost the only thing left is the theme and with it progress could be made fast to the website engine and have a test run with real data.
■ He also stated that all details could be provided to anyone motivated enough with HTML/CSS.
■ Matthias Kupfer said he could support HTML/CSS around Christmas, but not earlier.
■ Aleksey Bragin asked Maciej Bialas if he could assist in theming.
■ Maciej Bialas said he could, and added that he tried to create a simple theme first resembling the current one, and that aross said he could have done better by using some Drupal modules Maciej was not aware of.
■ Aleksey Bragin stated that a simple theme would suffice for now and a better one can always be done later.
■ Ziliang Guo asked about user and forum transfer status.
■ Aleksey Bragin replied that the forum is phpbb and therefore easily transferable.
■ Ziliang Guo asked about the reason for sticking with phpbb.
■ Amine Khaldi and Aleksey Bragin stated that it was for the sake of easier migration (i.e. migrate one thing at a time not everything at once).
■ Maciej Bialas stated that one downside to this was tedious integration with phpbb.
■ Aleksey Bragin pointed out that playground.reactos.org (with its intact database) will be what the new main site looks like when the switch is made.
■ Ziliang Guo said he can start trying to add content the coming weekend.
■ Amine Khaldi asked Ziliang Guo to keep everything minimalistic.
■ Aleksey Bragin moved the meeting on to the CMake adoption topic on the agenda.

2. CMake adoption
■ Aleksey Bragin took this chance to welcome Alex Ionescu back to the ReactOS project.
■ Amine Khaldi stated that Alex Ionescu stumbled upon a way to separate debug info from binaries, in a pdb similar way, using objcopy. He also mentioned that Alex helped by fixing two bugs in windmc and windres.
■ He went on to say that Alex suggested that we go back to using dwarf-2, only this time with pdb style debug, and with an improved, out of the kernel, symbols handling. He mentioned that Thomas Faber was kind enough to sketch a batch script that takes a debug log and translates the addresses inside it.
■ Amine Khaldi further stated that with the script + the CMake changes to take account of windres and objcopy, we'll be able to reduce the iso size, reduce the memory footprint, reduce the disk space needed to compile, use windres alone and get rid of handling symbols in the kernel (something "no other OS does" as Alex describes it).
■ He then explained that, on the RosBE level, this will only require updating binutils (gcc will stay at 4.4.3) with the patched windres and windmc, and it will also require the translating script to be part of RosBE.

A discussion ensued about testing the new RosBE and the following conclusions where reached:
■ Have a new Build Environment Release Candidate (2.0) which is an update to binutils (ld, windres, windmc, addr2line... etc) until the next meeting.
■ Keep the 4.4.3 version of gcc until the next meeting.
■ Alex Ionescu suggested having the new RosBE ready by the time of the next release. He also noted that this does not mean the new BE will be released along with the next version of ReactOS, but that it must be ready by then.
■ Cameron Gutman then brought up the issue of switching to gcc 4.6, but it was decided to keep gcc 4.4.3 until after the next release.
■ Thomas Faber then suggested an outlined step by step plan:
1) Update BE
2) Release new version of ReactOS (0.3.14)
3) Get rid of wrc
4) Get rid of rbuild
5) Switch to dwarf
6) Adopt new compiler (gcc 4.6)
After some deliberating it was agreed upon that Thomas Faber's proposed course of action is the best way to go, and his proposal was accepted.
■ Amine Khaldi then moved the meeting to the next topic.

3. Release status
■ Cameron Gutman inquired about the progress on the heap regression issue.
■ Thomas Faber stated that although he himself hasn't made much progress because he is very busy during the week, Jerome has been tracking it down pretty well and that it is apparently caused by resource loading.
■ Amine Khaldi took this chance too thank everyone for the awesome bugfixing phase, and stated that a lot of bugs has been fixed and a lot of regression has been addressed. He also went on to thank testers, and outlined the importance they have, and stated that he hopes this will be the mentality of the ReactOS project team, as thanks to it ReactOS is improving a lot.
■ He went on to say that as far as the remaining blockers are concerned, more team work on fixing them is needed, as this has proved very effective in the past. He also added that Jim Tabor did a good one man job on the jre issue, but that the other issues could use some teaming up.
■ Aleksey Bragin further added to this that ReactOS is on the way to possibly one of the best releases, and that after years have passed everyone is working towards the same goal, which, he added, is fantastic.
■ Cameron Gutman agreed that ReactOS is indeed very stable now, especially in kernel mode.
■ Olaf Siejka went on to sum up that entering the release stage would require at the very least fixing mshtml bug and fixing ldr regressions.
■ Aleksey Bragin agreed with Olaf Siejka on that point.
■ Kamil Hornicek inquired about the official stance about hackfixing certain bugs.
■ Aleksey Bragin and Amine Khaldi both explained that while hackfixing should be avoided, there are some bugs which cannot be resolved in a timely fashion. But hackfixing these should clearly be reflected in the commit message and comments in the code.
■ Amine Khaldi went on to ask for a more visible teaming up, for example on IRC and through bug reports, and to also request marking bugs as assigned when devs take them. He mentioned that since the release blockers remained unassigned for a while, it was difficult at times to keep track of who is working on what.
■ Cameron Gutman inquired if anybody objects to modifying the default color depth from 16-bit to 32-bit.
■ Olaf Siejka raised some concerns about this as it will affect QEMU since it does not support 32bpp.
■ Cameron Cutman further inquired about the possibility of falling back more gracefully as far as color depth is concerned when a video card does not support a certain resolution (right now it falls back directly to 8bpp). He went further to ask Timo Kreuzer if this is standard windows behavior.
■ Timo Kreuzer said he would need to investigate this issue.
■ Aleksey Bragin formally ended the meeting, thanking everyone for their time and information.
zefklop
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November 2011 meeting minutes

Post by zefklop »

20:00 : Aleksey Bragin calls the meeting to open.
Aleksey Bragin began with sharing a picture of an exposition in Russia, where he and Alexander Rechitskiy were present. They had the opportunity to meet young people and hopefully some of them will get involved with ReactOS.
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid= ... e=1&ref=nf


Website revamp status.

Maciej bialas said the website revamp was advancing slowly. 'Random Screenshots ' modules has been rewritten and integrated.
Daniel Reimer asked for a « captcha » for website registration. Maciej Bialas answered this would not be hard to integrate given the big number of such utilities available.
Igor Koshpaev asked for better integration of resizing in firefox and margins for improved readability. Maciej Bialas is aware of the problem and this will be taken care of.
Maciej Bialas said that style has been updated (though menus look like the old ones), as well as the main page. Left side of the page still lacks the links.
Maciej Bialas mentioned a feature added to the new website : a global constant keeping the latest ReactOS version.
Maciej also added that we can now benefit from the drupal feature of updating modules directly through its web interface, instead of manually updating files on server. One problem is that doing so breaks the SVN tree where files are stored. Aleksey Bragin proposed to keep only modules that we fork in SVN, and install others with help of Drupal web interface. Maciej Bialaj agreed, as ReactOS specific modules won't be updated through this interface anyway.
Victor Martinez asked what was left to do from a technical POV. Maciej replied that in long term, all submodules (testman, compatdb, getbuilds) have to be added to the new website.
Ziliang Guo asked Aleksey Bragin what was the status of bridges. Aleksey said it has them working for Drupal 6, but needed some help for upgrading them to Drupal 7. This will be done when Aleksey has more free time.
New website progress can be seen here : http://playground.reactos.org/

Release Status :
Aleksey Bragin spoke first. In last meeting he encouraged devs to work at bug fixing. He says that our developers did a good job in a last month, and the bugfixing flow was big. Developers start to get a good insight in one of the last blocker bug : bug 5857.
Giannis Adamopoulos asked if there was a chance that we release with it. Aleksey Bragin says he would agree to do so, but other developers are against this. Roel Messiant pointed out that our memory Manager is too fragile and fixing one bug could unhide an other, thus lengthening greatly the release process.
Also, Aleksey says he's going to rewrite mm after the release, so it would be a waste of resources to work on the existing one.
Cameron Gutman said he was against releasing with this bug, claiming that we are too close to the solution, and that we even have a way to reproduce it reliably. Jerome Gardou and Pierre Schweitzer supported him on that point. Aleksey Bragin wants to hack it away for the release, but that's no solution according to Pierre Schweitzer. Cameron added that if we had a hack, we would use it..
Jerome Gardou asked for a deadline. Aleksey Bragin answered that we need to release this year.
Maciej Bialaj proposed a Release Candidate. Aleksey Bragin pointed that it would be useless without at least a potential fix.
Ziliang Guo said that at the moment Victor Martinez called for testing on forums, this created a de facto RC. But testers can't test due to bug 5857, according to Victor.
Amine Khaldi reminded that bug 5857 wasn't the only blocker. We still have ldr bugs and some regression in golden apps. Those should be fixed in parallel of the blockers.
Amine Khaldi thanked Rafal Harabien for his outstanding work on shell32.
Amine Khaldi recalled that 3 ldr bugs remained : 6444, 6590, 6611.
Aleksey Bragin asked for a short summary of remaining blockers. Victor Martinez pointed some bugs in golden apps due to functions rewritten in RTL. (bug 6708).
Aaleksey Bragin would like to get Alex Ionescu on bug 6611. Victor Martinez says he has a patch for it.
Cameron Gutman says that developers shouldn't only focus on blockers, but bugfixing in general. Ziliang Guo expressed the fear that it would defeat the purpose of having « blocker bugs » besides « normal bugs ».
Cameron Gutman precised his point saying that it was no use for a developer to try fixing a blocker in an area he knows nothing of, thus letting other developers do so and fixing bugs in his area of predilection was more productive. If there was a blocker bug in an area he knows of, Cameron said he would give it priority.
This position made the consensus among those who were present.
Amine Khaldi also pointed out that bug 5857 got real attention since it became a blocker.
Timo Kreuzer said that the important thing was to have at least someone working on the blockers, and that having everyone on the same thing is a waste of time.
Cameron Gutman claimed that the bug 5857 was the only thing refraining us to release.
Victor Martinez answered that because of bug 5857 and ldr related ones, ReactOS was not usable.
Amine Khaldi proposed that developers should assign themselves bugs they feel comfortable with, see what they can do, and fix it or remove the assignment and update bugzilla with what they found so far in case of failure.
Jerome Gardou pointed that recent developers talks on IRC were very constructive, showing a new step in the project maturity. Victor Martinez agreed and said it was very motivational to observe this.

cmake adoption Status :
Amine khaldi said that the only blocker was the new Build Environment.
With Colin Finck (Unix BE maintainer) and Daniel Reimer (Windows BE maintainer) so busy, it will be hard to release a new one quickly.
Pierre Schweitzer proposed himself for taking over unix Build Environment and said he would contact Colin for details.
Daniel Reimer said that we needed a cmake build with ReactOS specific patches and Ziliang Guo's installer.
Daniel Reimer asked Jerome Gardou if there were newer patches for cmake. Jerome answered that what currently is in SVN is already fine.
Daniel Reimer said that newest binutils build seems fine.
Jerome Gardou asked what blocked a new Release candidate. Daniel answered that only lack of time was to blame, and that he would try to produce one next week. In the meantime, he welcomes suggestions on what could be integrated.
James Tabor said that we should adopt cmake once new BE is out. This seemed to get a general agreement among the team.
Amine Khaldi mentioned a batch script by Thomas Faber which achieves « pdb style debug separation », meaning getting rossym out of the kernel. This script has to be ported to unix.
Olaf Siejka asked what was the exact steps for cmake push. Daniel answered that it was only building cmake and putting everything in Ziliang Guo's setup package.

Public Realations Team :
Amine Khaldi asked for an official acknowledgement of our PR team, and suggested that Victor Martinez led it.
Pierre Schweitzer asked who could be the possible leaders. Amine Khaldi proposed Olaf Siejka, who refused.
Amine Khaldi said that we needed some coordination. He and Olaf Siejka take care of twitter. Alexander Rechitskiy take care of russian PR, and Victor Martinez of general PR.
Pierre Schweitzer proposed to postpone this decision to next meeting, waiting for the team to designate a leader.
Jerome Gardou asked Victor Martinez how he felt about it. He answered that he is pushing PR for several years now, and he wants to get more involved.
Pierre Schweitzer asked Amine Khaldi if he knew the PR people, and Olaf Siejka how many they were. It turned out that only Victor Martinez and Alexander Rechitskiy are really active.
Amine Khaldi asked for an official announcement that he ReactOS team care about PR. He hopes that doing so would draw more people from community to get involved.
Olaf Siejka pointed out that two people didn't make a team and don't really need coordination. Amine Khaldi answered that we needed to start somewhere. Olaf Siejka agreed that they had to come and organize themselves.
Jan Blomqvist Kinander announced that he'd like to get involvedd in PR.
Pierre Schweitzer said that he was not comfortable with designating a leader first and recruiting people later. Victor Martinez pointed that he wanted no leadership, but coordination, and that the hurry was to create a team, and specific roles had to be given later. This position got a good consensus among those who were present.
A general consensus among those who are present came : make an official announcement that the ReactOS project is building a PR team, and that those who want to get involved should contact Victor Martinez.
Cameron Gutman pointed that we should interact more with community. The pre-release calls for testing on the forums were a very good start.

[22:13] Aleksey Bragin closed the meeting, and thanked everyone for being present.

Team members status :
Olaf Siejka hasn't done much in November. He got got back to hardware testing, Cameron Gutman and he got few bugs squashed and new NICs checked as working in http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Supported_H ... ested_NICs

James Tabor is working on {Get,Set}WindowPLacement function in user32. While doing so, he stumbled on the horizontal scrollbar drawing issue. He looked in scroll control to be sure of where the problem really is. He also got more insight in some more bugs : he fixed ShowWindowAsync in minimize/maximize all windows handling. He started working on server side proc handling. Also scrolling issues in Miranda and mIRC are fixed. Flash window toggle function is almost done, but it crashes when freeing the memory pointer for the ATOM. He is also in the process of syncing some WINE code (user32, usp10 and tests, needed for the new wine edit control code). This fixes most Right-to-left windowing issues in controls. He also started SxS support in user32, but it's not yet functionnally integrated.

Thomas Faber is working on bug 5857 mostly. His todo list includes : WinDBG tutorial, improve random/crashing winetests, fixing C++ (replace stlport and fix building/runtime issues)

Jerome Gardou is also working on bug 5857. His todo list includes patching cmake for proper precompiled headers support, better MSVC integration (VS anb nmake multi-threaded builds), fixing c++ (same as Thomas Faber), getting last modules to compile with MSVC.
Last edited by vicmarcal on Sun Dec 04, 2011 12:30 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: really it is the postponed November official meeting
zefklop
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December 2011 meeting minutes

Post by zefklop »

The december 2011 meeting were postponed to 5th of January 2012.

20:05 : Aleksey Bragin calls the meeting open.

The only subject covered by those minutes is 0.3.14 release.

Aleksey Bragin recalled that bug 5857 (sometimes improperly called "mshtml bug") is still not fixed.
Aleksey Bragin asked Cameron Gutman if the bug could be fixed within two weeks.
Cameron Gutman said that the problem was narrowed down to a page directory problem. ReactOS allocates pages for virtual memory on demand. The memory manager allocates a page whenever the processor raise a page fault. The problem resides in the fact that sometimes the processor won't fault when it should.
Aleksey Bragin asked for confirmation that the problem relies in kernel.
Sylvain Petreolle reminded that the API tests demonstrated it.
Thomas Faber said that considering the effort put in fixing the Memory Manager (MM), the next area to look at would be the process/thread scheduler, particularly its relationship with MM.
Cameron gutman said that the actual question wasn't if we could fix it or not, but what to do in the event that we don't.
Those who were present agreed on this point.
Aleksey Bragin proposed a vote.
The results :
Question: Should 0.3.14 be released with "mshtml" bug if there is no fix/hackfix available for it within coming 2 weeks?
Yes - 8 votes
No - 7 votes
On a very short majority, it has been decided that the release process would be launched in this period.
Sylvain Petreolle proposed to release 0.3.15 just after a fix is found, which would include only the fix on top of 0.3.14.
Some people agreed to this proposition. [edit : no decision were taken on this matter]

22:41 Aleksey Bragin closes the meeting.

Developers Status :
James Tabor is still working on win32k. He's working on the same topics as last month, adding MDI on his todo-list.
Samuel Serapion is still working on the C runtime.
Thomas Faber is still working on mshtml-5857 bug, but he is very busy with university work.
Jerome Gardou is also working on it, but Real Life keeps putting him far from ReactOS.

I sincerely apologize for the time needed for releasing those minutes, especially considering how short they are.
Last edited by zefklop on Thu Jan 19, 2012 10:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
vicmarcal
Test Team
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Re: ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by vicmarcal »

February 2012 Meeting Minutes

2012-02-23
19:45 UTC
Fezile, #meeting

Proceedings

■ Meeting started at 19:45 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.

Point 1: Release status: 0.3.15
■ Aleksey Bragin proposed that we prepare trunk and release 0.3.15, as it is now, before anything major happens. Several members then wondered about the status of USB and the "mshtml bug". Jerome Gardou explained a bit about how the mshtml bug is far from completely being fixed, because if you look at testbot's results, there are still some problems with ASSERTs hit and some bad pagefaults happening when paging out.
■ A lengthy discussion occurred, about how ready trunk is, whether it's in a better state than 0.3.14, the state of the theme to be bundled with ROS, the plan for CLT, whether we should go 0.4<something> or 0.3.15... This was settled through a voting: "Do you agree to release 0.3.15 with current trunk features, before CLT?".
■ The total number of votes was 21, with 11 votes as Yes, 5 as No, and 5 abstentions. As a result, we will be having a 0.3.15 release with CLT being the deadline.

Point 2: New website status and migration plans
■ Amine Khaldi gave a quick summary on the state of the website revamp:
- Quite some progress has been made in the theming department, and it's visible from the playground. It's starting to look a lot like the current one, which means it's almost done (only some issues are left).
- Maciej Bialas has been investigating how to import users from the RosCMS. We will most likely need to compromise: members will have to reenter passwords when we migrate, but we'll see.
- Amine Khaldi then mentioned that we need help from web devs familiar with Drupal. Alexander Rechitskiy mentioned that he has a guy that wants to be part of the web team, and he passes his info to Amine to establish the contact.
- He also mentioned that Maciej is very busy, so the progress will slow down, and that the current short term plan is to continue the theming work, provide a way to import users, import the rest of data from wiki/bugzilla... etc. and finally add the phpbb bridge.
■ He then summarized the summary by saying: We needs skillful drupal guys, we're almost there, and that's it.

Point 3: CMake migration and finally abandoning RBuild
■ Amine Khaldi suggested that it's time to ditch rbuild, as he suspects most of our members have migrated already. Agreement on that, from ours members, was unprecedented as *everyone* were on favor of this :)
■ We agreed on doing the necessary commits/infrastructure changes ASAP, i.e. "tonight" (relative to the meeting of course), but that didn't happen just yet so it's just a matter of time. Amine Khaldi wants to do the honors (the commit that will remove rbuild and its related files).
■ Amine Khaldi also mentioned that he's preparing a nice little surprise for major build performance boost, on many levels, so stay tuned guys ;)
■ Jerome Gardou explained that he'll be handling the PCH support to get it to a much better state than it is right now.

Point 4: Added per Amine Khaldi's request: GSoC preparations
■ Amine Khaldi explained that he created a Google Doc and invited the interested members. He asked the members to collaborate and shape up an excellent ideas list, projects that fit in GSoC at both the time and complexity levels.
■ Colin suggested building up on the last year in terms of informative content (wiki pages from last year), covering questions about how we deal with students, our application form... etc.

■ Meeting closed at 21:45 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.
■ Minutes written by Amine Khaldi.
hto
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Post by hto »

March 2012 Meeting Minutes

2012-03-29
19:00 UTC
Fezile, #meeting

Proceedings

■ Meeting started at 19:00 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.

Point 1: The state of Trunk
■ Cameron Gutman gave some examples how badly Trunk has regressed since 0.3.14:
- Frequent bugchecks and assertions in the console
- Broken Unicode in the console
- Several key apps such as Firefox, Ping, Dwnl and Notepad being broken or rarely working

He opened a discussion about improving the quality of Trunk.

■ Timo Kreuzer favorized a stricter revert-on-regressions policy. By employing the Patchbot buildslave, "evil" changes should be detected in advance before committing them. According to Giannis Adamopoulos, the Patchbot currently needs 20 minutes in total for building and testing a patch.
■ Colin Finck asked whether the current regressions were visible in the automated regression tests. Aleksey Bragin denied this for most of them as these were usability problems not detected by our regression tests.
■ Various people suggested frameworks such as AutoIt and AutoHotKey to automate application testing as well.
■ To also automate real hardware testing, Jan Blomqvist Kinander has set up another server. He reported that he could successfully perform a remote ReactOS installation on it and just needs some scripts to automate the procedures now.
■ Aleksey Bragin illustrated his plan to move more towards loosely managed development. In particular, he wants to introduce Atlassian tools such as FishEye and JIRA to plan activity and actually do stuff.
■ Cameron Gutman wanted a firm decision about dealing with regressions first. Aleksey Bragin responded that the current rules still apply: A commit shall be reverted after one day if it breaks booting or installation. Other regressions shall be reported in Bugzilla using the REGRESSION prefix.
■ Olaf Siejka criticized the way bugs are currently handled. The list at http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Bug_Filters ... eview_list is getting bigger and bigger while developers don't take responsibility for it. He added that a decision was taken to release early last month, although no progress towards implementing it was visible.
■ Alex Ionescu joined the meeting later and reopened the discussion about using Atlassian tools. In his opinion, JIRA and FishEye can support our development along with Bamboo as a build and continuous integration system. Later on, these systems could be set up to only accept a commit if it can be successfully built by Bamboo.
- Olaf Siejka wants to set up a Bamboo test system to evaluate the tool.
- Alex Ionescu will send out an E-Mail as soon as our setup is ready for testing.

Point 2: Plan for the next month
■ The previous discussion about improving development using new tools continued here. While Aleksey Bragin outlined that he wants to finish the setup in April, Alex Ionescu gave more examples about what needs to be changed when moving to JIRA:
- A dynamic component maintainer list should be added to establish a clear chain of responsibility for all parts of ReactOS.
- User privileges should be changed to let only component maintainers classify their bugs.
■ Furthermore, the list at http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Bug_Filters ... eview_list has been discussed again. Alex Ionescu and Timo Kreuzer agreed that such general lists are pointless and the following approach was suggested instead:
- Developers owning bugs and being mailed about them
- Release not being made until all important bugs are fixed
- Someone to prioritize which bugs are blocking a release
■ Alex Ionescu outlined more ideas about improving the release process. He suggested to create a roadmap for each release and picking several specific bugs as goals for this release. Only fixes for these bugs should go into a release, new features could be prepared in branches.
■ The branches idea was picked up by Amine Khaldi who questioned that SVN was able to properly handle more branches for new features, release preparation, etc. due to its limited branching capabilities.
■ Alex Ionescu did not agree with this, because people can merge just subdirectories of a branch into Trunk or even bundle all changes in .patch files and simply apply them.
■ Timo Kreuzer called for a feature freeze in Trunk before the discussion on point 2 ended, but Aleksey Bragin stated that this would prevent further work on fixing Mm.
■ Aleksey Bragin finally repeated that he is going to finish the setup of the new tools in April and wants to get everybody used to them. The idea of having modules owners shall get more developer responsibility towards issues and patches.

Point 3: Next release discussion
■ Aleksey Bragin postponed this discussion to the next meeting as most of the topics have already been covered in the discussion about Trunk. No objections were raised.

Point 4: New website status
■ Maciej Bialas reported that he is at the point of applying small fixes now as well as importing the user database into Drupal. He stated that every user needs to change his password after the migration because of different hashing algorithms used in Drupal and RosCMS.
■ Pierre Schweitzer noted that we should prevent another mass mailing of all registered users due to the problems caused by the last one.
■ Ziliang Guo proposed to just create a sticky forum post and write a mail to a ReactOS mailing list about the password changes. There were no objections.
■ The participants agreed to continue discussions about website content on the mailing lists.

Point 5: Miscellaneous
■ Giannis Adamopoulos picked up the new subsystem layout for Win32k, which had already been discussed a year ago and was postponed. He outlined it at http://pastie.org/3694259. Aleksey Bragin, James Tabor and Timo Kreuzer agreed on it, so it will be committed within the next 4 days.
■ Art Yerkes reported about his work on NewCC. In particular, he is currently looking at a bug not existing in a non-NewCC build. He expects other issues afterwards, but thinks that the entire work is progressing well.

■ Meeting closed at 21:55 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.
■ Minutes written by Colin Finck.
hto
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Posts: 2193
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Post by hto »

April 2012 Meeting Minutes

2012-04-26
19:00 UTC
Fezile, #meeting

Proceedings

■ Meeting started at 19:20 UTC by Amine Khaldi.

Point 1: The state of Trunk
■ Amine Khaldi mentioned that we still have several regressions to get fixed. Olaf Siejka stressed the fact that developers should actually look into these regressions and fix them, and wondered about the optimal selection process to ensure this.
■ Timo Kreuzer suggested that we should assign these regressions, to increase the possibility of having them fixed. He explained that the selection should be by the guilty revision first (the revision that triggers the regression), and the author of that revision should at least take a look, and if it's really not his fault and he can't fix it, then he can assign it back to ros-bugs.
■ Amine Khaldi mentioned that at the moment there is no way to know what developers are working on exactly, until they commit, and suggested using bug reports to document the development, so that commits will mention them at the end.
■ Amine also suggested the following process for the regressions: We assign those regressions to the author of the guilty revision, the developer investigates the regression. If he's able to fix the bug, he changes the bug status to “Assigned” which means he now owns this bug. If he can't fix it, he will document his finding so far (a comment in the bug report) and he assigns the bug to any other developer that he thinks he can fix this, and so on.
■ Everyone agreed, as a result, that we should assign regressions, and that developers should look at what's assigned to them.

Point 2: Overview of the Atlassian tools
■ Amine Khaldi gave an overview of what we plan to do with Atlassian products (Jira, FishEye, Crucible, Bamboo… etc) in case people didn't go to their website to read about them and watch their videos (http://www.atlassian.com/).
■ Olaf Siejka asked about an ETA for the Atlassian tools adoption. Aleksey Bragin mentioned that this will happen in the coming two weeks.

Point 3: Discussing a possible change in the release cycle
■ Alexander Rechitskiy presented some links from the KDE project about their SVN guidelines, commit policy, release schedule, minor point releases… etc.
■ After a lengthy discussion, the team decided to continue the already started efforts to improve efficiency and minimize regressions (like leveraging Patchbot, the recent major Testman improvements… etc).

■ Meeting closed at 21:26 UTC by Amine Khaldi.
■ Minutes written by Amine Khaldi.
Z98
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Re: ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by Z98 »

July 2012 Meeting A Minutes

2012-07-05
19:00 UTC
dev.reactos.org, #meeting

Proceedings
===========
* Meeting started at 19:16 UTC by Aleksey Bragin.

* Point 0: CD/Product Store
* Point 1: Update/Team Plan
* Point 2: Website Update
* Point 3: Internet Declaration

Due to scheduling constraints by some participants, the question of a
team store and sale of ReactOS CDs was moved to be the first topic.

* Point 0
Ziliang Guo presented the question of CD sales and merchendise sales
in general. Amine Khaldi updated the team on the work he and others
have done to get storefronts up and going. The primary concern was a
lack of decent designs for the stores. Ziliang was tasked with
contacting graphic artists he knows in the community to see if this
can be remedied. The decision of what to do with the promo CDs was
left to Ziliang as well.

* Point 1
Aleksey Bragin stated that he intended to help with Jira integration
with the new site, which is necessary as a replacement for bugzilla.
He also hopes to help with making the build environment more user
friendly.

Olaf Siejka reported on a variety of regressions in freeldr and the
win32 subsystem that he wants fixed as they are blocking further
development and testing. Other developers asked for specific reports
to be assigned to them and reviewed whether they thought they knew the
cause of regressions.

Collaboration with the UniATA developer was also discussed, with
reports that upstream patches have been accepted and suggestions on
further work that can be done.

* Point 2
Danny Gotte was not present so this point was skipped.

* Point 3
Pierre Schweitzer presented the Internet Declaration
(http://www.internetdeclaration.org/freedom), a statement of beliefs
drafted by various groups that wish the internet to remain free of
censorship and ensure user privacy. Many other organizations have
signed onto it and Pierre asked whether the ReactOS Foundation should
also do so. This was put to a vote and passed with overwhelming
support.

* Other Decisions
Ziliang requested that all developers be added onto the public
relations mailing list. This was approved.

Meeting was closed at 20:38 by Aleksey Bragin
Minutes were prepared by Ziliang Guo
Z98
Release Engineer
Posts: 3379
Joined: Tue May 02, 2006 8:16 pm
Contact:

Re: ReactOS Meeting Minutes

Post by Z98 »

July 2012 Meeting B Minutes

2012-07-26
19:00 UTC
dev.reactos.org, #meeting

Proceedings

Meeting started at 19:09 by Aleksey Bragin
  • Point 1: Website Update
  • Point 2: Technical Questions by Newer Team Members
Point 1

Danny Gotte noted that he was still having trouble with the Java code to plug into the Atlassian web applications. Ziliang Guo had stated that he could help, as he had Java development experience, but both he and Danny had exams this week and so did not have time to do any actual work.

Ziliang reported that approximately 80% of the content for the new CMS is ready, with a big chunk of the remaining 20% being updated screenshots for various guides. Danny suggested asking people in the community for help. Ziliang and the others agreed and Ziliang said he would draft a list of needed screenshots once he had helped with the Java problems. Aleksey and Olaf Siejka wanted to push for a transition by the next meeting.

Update regarding point 1: Ziliang worked around the initial problems Danny faced with the Atlassian plugin and handed a partially implemented prototype to Danny, which also provided log output, which Danny was having trouble getting before.

Point 2

Alexander Rechitskiy and Hermes Belusca Maito reported on their efforts to test a variety of installers on ReactOS and asked for some help and opinions on why things failed. Two issues were raised, one regarding failures to create TCP connections and the other regarding the Windows version ReactOS returned. Ziliang pointed out that one of the installers where the version check seemingly failed might have been looking for XP, whereas ReactOS reports itself as Server 2003. Additional discussion followed on how to diagnose such issues with no real conclusions and suggestions the matter be continued in the development channel.

Meeting was closed at 20:54 by Ziliang, as Aleksey had to leave early.

Minutes prepared by Ziliang Guo.
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