ReactOS plans for 2012
This year, instead of looking back on previous year to sum up what has been done, I will speak about what is planned.
First thing is the long awaited 0.3.14 release. It is on the way to be released and has been branched. This will be an important ReactOS release. We took time to prepare it, and it comes with numerous and great changes. Unfortunately, as several rewrites took place, some regressions are to be expected. And some people may not be able to install ReactOS any longer. In case it happens (in VMs), change your virtualisation software (or downgrade it in case it is Virtual Box). We know that is a real problem. But in spite of our efforts, we could not kick it out. It will require huge work. But, as expressed there are ways to work around.
Most of my work on ReactOS will take place in background. In 2011, I became one of the ReactOS systems administrators. Which means, ensuring servers are running properly and up to date, but also deploy new things to make developers everyday life easier. This year, we plan to deploy two more test bots. One on VMware ESX, another on VMware Player on Linux. Both handled through libvirt and our sysreg tool. I already started implementing the support in our tool.
Another thing will be the (also long awaited) switch to CMake. We will drop support for our own solution (rbuild) to use CMake to handle ReactOS builds. This has been postponed until release and until ReactOS Build Environments (RosBEs) are ready. Both are about to be completed. On RosBE-Unix, I took over on Colin, as he has less time to give to ReactOS. We also have a last build slave running rbuild builds. Once CMake switch will be done, it will be time to tell him good bye. It will be a real switch for the project. The last rbuild builder has done more than 10k builds!
I also plan to deploy another static analysis tool on our server to check ReactOS code quality. We already have cppcheck (with quite huge configuration, by the way…) that returns pretty good results. We also make use of Coverity with success. The idea would be to add another and rather different tool: sixgill. This tool appears to be successfully used by the Mozilla Foundation.
The Foundation also have a Windows Server 2003 license that we would like to use to set up a test environment for developers. That way, they could write tests for functions, run them on Windows 2003, and implement/fix the right way on ReactOS. Method which is also called: test-driven development. Rather useful for us!
Finally, if I have still a bit of time (looks difficult!), I would like to finish all the things I have started/planned last year on ReactOS. But I guess it will not be that easy…
Tags: CMake, cppcheck, ESX, Player, rbuild, RosBE, sixgill, VMware