Hi, I've been lurking on this list for several years, but I have some thoughts about this issue so I hope you don't mind me posting now.
It seems to me as though discussions like this are more of a "distro-level" thing - if you consider how Linux does things, the kernel is a separate project from the userland, and it's up to the distros (like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) to decide whether to ship a tftp server. Now, I must admit I'm not an expert on the internals of ReactOS at all, so please forgive me if this idea is not technically feasible, but couldn't we make a similar kind of separation in ReactOS? As far as I can see, there's no technical reason why even something like USER32.DLL couldn't be a completely separate project from the ReactOS kernel, using maybe a different branch of the source code and testing on Windows XP. After all, the GNU tools were written in this way, gradually replacing core components of various Unixes. So, if we follow the same kind of development model as Linux, the ReactOS kernel would be the sole ReactOS project. Then you would have different maintainers for different parts, say USER32.DLL. Then you would have someone who compiles "distros" of ReactOS, picking and choosing the best pieces to go with the kernel itself. You could have a "netboot-specialised" distro which included the tftp and PXE stuff, or a more general "newbie" distro. I would expect that many of the subprojects would share code in order to make things a bit easier - but the important thing to realise is that they wouldn't be forced to. Say if the USER32 maintainer decided to do a Wine sync, but the kernel guys didn't want to, this would actually be OK and would still work fine. The USER32 maintainer could, if they wanted, have a completely separate source tree from the ReactOS kernel. As long as the USER32 DLL worked on Windows XP, it would be good - if the ReactOS kernel didn't work with it, it would be a bug in the kernel. So, is this idea feasible or is there some reason why it wouldn't work? Please feel free to call me an idiot if I've missed some important technical detail, but it seems to me that introducing this kind of separation would really help the project to move forward very quickly in the same way that Linux has. Best regards, Peter Millerchip. 2009/5/15 Aleksey Bragin <alek...@reactos.org>: >> I don't mind moving the stuff out to rosapps but I thought we were >> going to adopt a targeted makefile system rather than a multi-tree >> system. > > That was the solution many seemed to agree to, just a couple of > months ago in this same mailing list. Let's keep it and not start yet > another "let's move that from trunk to rosapps, and bring something > else from rosapps to trunk" move wars. > > Consistency means consistency. > > > WBR, > Aleksey Bragin. > _______________________________________________ > Ros-dev mailing list > Ros-dev@reactos.org > http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev > _______________________________________________ Ros-dev mailing list Ros-dev@reactos.org http://www.reactos.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-dev
