ReactOS 0.3.5
Monday, June 30th, 2008It was first planned for April 2008, and finally it’s been released on the 30th of June… The long history of a such delayed release.
It has been delayed in April because of important regressions in code that lead to the impossibility to install or run FireFox 2 (for example). Then (during June), it’s been delayed because of internal problem due to the restrictions dictated to a developer who was coding in a quite bad way (he finally left the development team, and the project). Those problems finally came out, and created many problems because people got afraid about the ReactOS future. It was so an “emergency” to release 0.3.5 (I’ve to admit that I’ve purpose in the middle of June that we should skip 0.3.5 and wait for 0.3.6) to make people not worry about ReactOS. So, developers hurried up to fix bugs. I said developers and not “we” because I didn’t fix any bugs because they were in branch of ReactOS where I’m completely unskilled :(. One of the major bug (the one that made FireFox unusable) got fixed by a external developer who finally enter the development team (his patches are really great!). The rest were fixed by our lead developer, Aleksey Bragin.
And here we are, ReactOS 0.3.5, a free release (ReactOS will stay a FOSS! despite some people words…). After the bugs of the 0.3.4 (it was a really bad release, that’s we didn’t want to re do that!), this will be a great version, more stable. It adds some nice features, and will let people who don’t know English use it easily.
Now, some words about the work I’ll realize for ReactOS 0.3.6. As you perhaps see (if you’re a ReactOS addict!), I stopped developing on trunk. Colin Finck created (on demand, I wasn’t obliged such as former developer…) a branch to all stuff related to FileSystems Drivers (FSD). Those drivers let ReactOS reads data from various partitions type. Today, ReactOS only support FAT32 which is really limited. So using this branch, I’ll try to let it support Ext2 and NTFS partitions. I’ll also try to improve our FAT32 driver and our FSD support (some Kernel APIs are missing). I’m not sure I’ll be able to achieve some minor features for 0.3.6, but let’s hope! 
Have a nice day… on ReactOS!
Edit on the 4th of July: I just would like to add a piece of advice to people who could have planned to use ReactOS NTFS features. It appears (well, in fact, it’s sure) that I introduced a really bad bug in revision 34036 (with two others that have been fixed before 0.3.5). It’s not been fixed yet (even in my branch, but perhaps in my working copy (WC)). It has only been hack fixed right now (but after 0.3.5 release!). What does it do? It makes ReactOS freezing at different stages. So, the best method to avoid it is not using NTFS volumes on the testing machine. And if there’s no choice, don’t try to browser any NTFS volume (moreover, even if there wasn’t that bug, it wouldn’t work :p).
I’m sorry for the inconveniences caused by this bug :(.