DCE 1.2.2 released under LGPL license (strategically important for Wine)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

dear wine developers,

you may have noticed that DCE 1.2.2 was released on the 12th january
2005 under an LGPL license.

as you are no doubt aware, the significance of DCE/RPC is very, very
high.

in particular, with FreeDCE using an NTLMSSP authentication plugin and a
"Named Pipes" transport in samba or samba tng, it becomes possible for
FreeDCE to be utilised to make DCOM applications work under Wine.

DCOM applications can be made to WORK under Wine using FreeDCE, Samba or
Samba TNG with NamedPipes.

unmodified Win32 applications can do DCE/RPC and DCOM utilising FreeDCE
and Samba, with a minimum of development effort inside Wine and Samba.


also, FreeDCE can be leveraged to provide _proper_ implementations of
the underlying Win32 interfaces.

for example, REGEDT32.EXE can be made to work over a network running
_natively_ under Wine.

NetUserGetInfo can return "meaningful" information.
NetShareEnum likewise.
NetServerGetInfo likewise.

the list goes on [to cover a large section of the Win32 API
developed in the 80s and early 90s]

so may i take this as an opportunity to point out two things:

1) articles and news regarding the release of DCE 1.2.2

	http://www.opengroup.org/comm/press/05-01-12.htm

	http://advogato.org/article/817.html

	http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/14/1833226&tid=117&tid=187&tid=1...

2) DCE 1.2.2, FreeDCE and Samba TNG have zero funding of any kind.

	the possibilities are very exciting, yet curiously these
	strategically important projects that could remove
	microsoft's stranglehold on hundreds of thousands of
	businesses and millions of home users world-wide are
	drastically underutilised.

	i will do what i can, but my spare time (and elrond's)
	are precious resources.

the opportunity is there: all i can do is present it to you.

l.

-- 
--
<a href="http://lkcl.net">http://lkcl.net</a>
--

[Steven Edwards]

Hi,

--- Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl(a)lkcl.net> wrote:
> DCOM applications can be made to WORK under Wine using FreeDCE, Samba or
> Samba TNG with NamedPipes.
>
> unmodified Win32 applications can do DCE/RPC and DCOM utilising FreeDCE
> and Samba, with a minimum of development effort inside Wine and Samba.

I was under the impression quite a bit of work would still be needed to make
it binary compatible. 

Thanks
Steven


		
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[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sun, Jan 16, 2005 at 09:03:13AM -0800, Steven Edwards wrote:
> Hi,
>
> --- Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl(a)lkcl.net> wrote:
> > DCOM applications can be made to WORK under Wine using FreeDCE, Samba or
> > Samba TNG with NamedPipes.
> >
> > unmodified Win32 applications can do DCE/RPC and DCOM utilising FreeDCE
> > and Samba, with a minimum of development effort inside Wine and Samba.
>
> I was under the impression quite a bit of work would still be needed to make
> it binary compatible.

if it is, then FreeDCE is the gateway that provides a really large
 chunk of the missing functionality.

 DCOM has already been added to FreeDCE: the IDL files (from which
 the header files are auto-generated) are all there.

 ... lessavalook, make sure i'm not talking rubbish.  just
 looking closely at the code, here: freedce/dcom/dcom.h says:

	/* 
	 * API Definitions for DCOM, part of the FreeDCE & DCOM package.
	 * This file borrows from objbase.h, part of the Windows Includes,
	 * Copyright Microsoft Corporation.
	 * */

 hm.
 
 does anyone know how to replace this file with a free software
 alternative?  surely you have deployed techniques to provide full
 header-file interoperability?

 is there anyone prepared to advise / do same here?

 also, the samba team are also implementing DCOM support:
 they are paid to do work on samba and so may have some of
 the key components (e.g. a header file as above!), albeit they
 are working in an incompatible framework.
 
 they have chosen to reimplement what FreeDCE provides, rather
 than adapt it, as they have chosen to reimplement kerberos
 and ldap, rather than adapt to and extend those projects.

 i understand their logic and reasoning behind choosing to
 not use FreeDCE [you must use the FreeDCE POSIX draft 4 threading
 library], but i find ... never mind, it's a story for
 another day.  anyway.

 FreeDCE's IDL compiler has been extended to provide full MSRPC
 interoperability: UCS-2 unicode string support and some complex
 expressions for transferring data over-wire.
 
 it is a mature project that needs little adaptation and
 extension: samba's idl compiler is very very basic, and the
 framework being developed is very immature, still in flux,
 and places a large burden of effort on the developer.

 FreeDCE's IDL compiler is IDL-compatible and
 framework-compatible with the MSRPC IDL compiler.

 the choice is yours.

 l.

[Ivan Leo Puoti]

> /* 
>    * API Definitions for DCOM, part of the FreeDCE & DCOM package.
>    * This file borrows from objbase.h, part of the Windows Includes,
>    * Copyright Microsoft Corporation.
>    * */
>
> hm.
>
> does anyone know how to replace this file with a free software
>  alternative?  surely you have deployed techniques to provide full
>  header-file interoperability?
> If it's just header stuff we can replace it with the mingw ones.

Ivan.

[Mike Hearn]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 18:30:40 +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> DCOM has already been added to FreeDCE: the IDL files (from which
>  the header files are auto-generated) are all there.

I already checked out FreeDCE and the newly released DCE-RPC several days
ago. Neither provides a DCOM implementation, neither resembles what we
need. We may be able to take some code or ideas from them with some work
to massage it, but there's not much of use there.