ReactOS Print Spooler Service (Spoolsv)
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Contents
Application Information
| Title/Summary: | ReactOS Print Spooler Service (Spoolsv) |
|---|---|
| Student: | Peter Windridge (twowheels on #ReactOS) |
| Student Major: | Mathematics |
| Student Degree: | Undergrad |
| Student Graduation: | 2006 |
| Assigned Mentor: | Alex Ionescu |
Detailed Description
Motivation
ReactOS has great potential, but will be crippled without good printer support. With the addition of print providers, monitors and a few changes in win32k I envisage that ReactOS could be used as a Windows print server in as little as a year, as well as for desktop printing. This could enable it to be used in small businesses (and by myself!). For this reason, I would like to work on the Print spooler service.
Background
I originally began working on print support in ReactOS out of personal need. For research and academic purposes (I am a masters student at the University of Warwick, which has a highly rated Computer Science department), I use Mandrake but I would prefer ReactOS. Most of the software I use already runs on ReactOS, however I do miss print support. So, over the past 8 months I have been studying the Windows print subsystem by - reading MSDN, the DDK examples and Feng Yuan’s book - writing some tests and stubbing out the required components and loading them in Windows (XP) - studying win32k (in particular, how we can cleanly implement [enhanced] metafiles and printer DC’s in ReactOS). Finally I have spoken to people from WINE (Detlef ”winspool”) and Samba-tng (Elrond) about how we can collaborate and share code. The Samba project has already done lots of work reversing SMB. In short, I have a good idea about what is required to implement the spooler service.
Although I am studying maths and probability theory, I have broad programming experience from vacation employment, freelancing, university courses and teaching programming courses at university. I have contributed to the open source Nullsoft Install System and written freeware applications. I also have good knowledge of hardware and networking. This would be helpful for setting up test networks etc. My brief cv is at http://windridge.org.uk/peter_windridge_web_cv.pdf).
I have been reading and compiling the ReactOS source for over a year and while I have not submitted any patches, I have submitted bug reports and written bits of code within my own tree. I run ReactOS on real hardware.
I have applied for no other SOC projects because this is the project I would enjoy the most. I believe it would also be a great benefit to ReactOS. In addition, ReactOS has some very skilled mentors whom I can learn from.
Overall, I have the skills and drive to complete the project in the short time frame and make a real contribution.
Thanks, Peter (twowheels on #ReactOS)
Project Status
Although Google considers the work on this project to be unsatisfactory and has unlisted it. Peter Windridge states that he was unable to meet the target goals due to unforeseen problems he is still working on the project in his spare time.
