Reverse engineering *

Good day to you!

My name is Stanislav and I like to write code. This is my first english article on Habr which I made due to several reasons:

• Habr is now in English
• Lack of technical articles in the ReactOS hub
• Recent return of Geektimes to Habr
• Possibility of building ReactOS in ReactOS
• Quite interesting case of fixing the problem in ReactOS in which I was directly involved

This article is an english version of my very first article on russian.

Let me introduce the main figures in this story who actually fixed the bug preventing Git from running in ReactOS — the French developer Hermès Bélusca-Maïto (or just Hermes with hbelusca nickname) and of course me (with x86corez nickname).

The story begins with the following messages from the ReactOS Development IRC channel:

Jun 03 18:52:56 <hbelusca> Anybody want to work on some small problem? If so, can someone figure out why this problem https://jira.reactos.org/browse/CORE-12931 happens on ReactOS? :D
Jun 03 18:53:13 <hbelusca> That would help having a good ROS self-hosting system with git support.
Jun 03 18:53:34 <hbelusca> (the git assertion part only).

Introduction

If you have dabbled into microchip photographing before, then this article will probably not offer much to you. But if you want to get into it, but don’t know where to start, then it’s exactly for you.

Before we start, a fair warning: while the procedure is quite entertaining, at first it’ll probably be physically painful. The chemicals used during the process are toxic, so please handle them carefully – that way it’ll still hurt, but less so. Also, if you have even a slight amount of common sense, conduct the procedure in a fully-equipped chemical laboratory under supervision of trained professionals: we’ve had to deal with people who tried to do it at home immediately after reading the guide. And finally: if you don’t know whether you need to pour acid into water or water into acid without a Google search and don’t realize what this lack of knowledge will entail – stop reading this immediately and go to a chemistry 101 course in a local college or something.