wine-devel

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84471 discussions

Re: Internally maintained end-to-end API documentation
by Brian Vincent (C) 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

> After reading Wine Weekly News Issue #200, (Congrats > by the way), I stumbled across the Wine Status Pages. Thanks. > In my humble opinion, this is a very dangerous and > volatile place to have it. It is volatile and there have definitely been instances of people wondering where documentation has disappeared to. > This is quite tragic as my knowledge of XML is really > weak. As far as I know, it's that HTML superset, isn't > it? SGML is the one document format To Rule Them All. XML is a subset of that. HTML is a subset of XML (and therefore SGML). Realistically, Wine could probably use XML for all its documents. But we use SGML since that was around first. We convert the SGML into various nice document formats depending on how it's used. If you know HTML then you won't have much of a problem marking up SGML. > Stepping back a bit, I started thinking of tossing an > SQL database on one of my machines and writing some > kind of dynamic HTML front end for it. I wouldn't. Wine has lots of tools in use for building and searching documentation, not the least of which is "grep". > The second hurtle is what to put as the actual > fields. I'm really only used to seeing function > rendered an a "Unix man style" format. Name, synopsis, > description, return value, errors, bugs. I actually really like this idea. The standard C library is nicely documented in man pages, why shouldn't Win32 be the same way? I don't think we need another document format or repository (Side note, is it just me, or is the GNU texinfo format the stupidest form of documentation ever invented..) The important thing is, keep the documentation in a format that is easily modifiable by developers. Since most have a copy of CVS laying around that probably means keeping docs in a text format somewhere in the documentation/ directory. The scope of this project is huge. In some ways you're trying to recreate MSDN, and as Greg pointed out that documentation lives on real media in the hands of thousands of people. Yes, it might be nice to replicate that but copyright issues are something you'll need to be aware of. If you rewrite all of it by hand you definitely won't infringe on copyrights, but is there an easier way put it together? Something tells me there's already some resources out there that could be used as a foundation. Also, be sure to read the "Terms of Use" link at the bottom of msdn.microsoft.com. It may as well just say "You can only read our web pages." A quick search on Google alludes to people writing man pages for Win32. This was on a NetBSD mailing list: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-bugs/2001/05/17/0008.html >Number: 12974 >Category: pkg >Synopsis: w32doc-borland - man pages for the win32 api >Confidential: no >Severity: non-critical >Priority: low >Responsible: pkg-manager >State: open >Class: change-request >Submitter-Id: net >Arrival-Date: Thu May 17 13:16:00 PDT 2001 >Closed-Date: >Last-Modified: >Originator: Ben Collver >Release: 1.5 >Organization: >Environment: >Description: >A set of Unix-like man pages for the Windows 32 API. This package creates >a new manual section (wb) containing man pages derived from a Windows >help file distributed by Borland for Delphi2. Once installed, you could for >example read the WinMain man page by typing "man wb WinMain". >This documentation is not as up-to-date as that in devel/w32doc. --------------- Brian Vincent Copper Mountain Telecom vincentb(a)coppercolorado.com

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Re: TDI + NetBIOS = Network Neighborhood
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 16 Dec '03

16 Dec '03

hi, wrote to the wine-devel mailing list about this one describing a few words about what's needed to be done to "support" your efforts. documentation. rfc1001.txt and rfc1002.txt - these describe NBT (netbios over tcp) and how to get: - datagrams (port 138) equivalent to UDP - sessions (port 139) equivalent to TCP - names (port 137) LISTEN UP! THIS IS EQUIVALENT TO DYNAMIC-DNS + DHCP! the last one of these needs careful explanation. in light of the recent attempts by the wireless IETF crowd to create a dynamic routing protocol is is _totally_ ironic that netbios got there first _by over twenty years_ - and that there is a FREE implementation for the taking, in nmbd. it's also pretty ironic because they've had to play catch-up with concepts like node status queries in additional extension draft rfcs, and they STILL haven't added the "name conflict" concept which is there to tell anyone that will listen that a name which is attempting to be claimed is being taken by someone else who won't give it back. port 137 _is_ actually dns, so if you happen to know of any wine-licensing compatible DNS client code then you can use that as the basis for your efforts. it's dns but it's extended: the names of the types of packets mean slightly different things; there is additional packet types to represent NAME_REGISTER and NAME_STATUS; there is also a different CNAME type to cope with netbios names; the "dns zone" is there it's called a "scope"; the "dns name" is "compressed" it's a brain-dead misnomer given that the name is actually expanded in some sort of stupid base-4 (no, not base-64, yes, that's right, base-4) encoding scheme that turns a 16-byte space-padded thing into an overbloated 64-byte monster. cifsbrow.txt. eek, it's been a while. have a look at www.cb1.com/~lkcl/ntdom. no, try this: http://www.monyo.com/technical/samba/rfc/ actually, first try this: http://ubiqx.org/cifs/References.html which will give you a better idea of what the other one contains: the ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/drg/CIFS directory appears to be inaccessible, now, which is just typical. basically you should read cifsbrow.txt in conjunction with rfc1001.txt and rfc1002.txt. SKIM THEM! YOU ONLY NEED A MINIMAL SUBSET OF THOSE DOCUMENTS FOR A CLIENT IMPLEMENTATION!!!! the only reason that you need to read those docs - skimmed - is because you need to know what you are going to be communicating with (not implementing, server-side, just connecting to, client-side). all you _really_ need is to be able to do a NetBIOS name query and also to be able to do a couple of SMB queries to obtain lists of servers. THAT IS ALL THAT A CLIENT-SIDE NETWORK NEIGHBOURHOOD BROWSER IS. REALLY! if you're implementing this from scratch, however, expect to allocate about ... mmm ... anywhere between four and eight weeks. i _thoroughly_ recommend that you investigate finding some dns client code to adapt and save yourself some time with decoding port 137. also, while you're at it, you might want to next focus on the contents of the ntnp.doc file which was last available with the ms-dev that contained visual studio 4.3. ntnp.doc stands for nt network provider and it had a companion "client-side" document to describe the other bit that went with it. basically there is a "redirector" protocol on both client _and_ server-side that covers browsing. these two protocols "merge" the network neighbourhoods into one big happy family, such that netware's network neighbourhood can be installed and cooperate happily with the smb network neighbourhood can be installed and cooperate happily with the kerberos-domain-based network neighbourhood and it was all one big happy family yippee. so, whilst you may believe that it is best to implement the network neighbourhood browsing functions as "direct" as possible, if you ever install the "client for netware" under wine and then wonder why it doesn't appear in the network neighbourhood, remember what i said in the paragraph above!! l.

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Vacation
by Alexandre Julliard 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Folks, There won't be any commits for a while, since I'm leaving now for a vacation in Switzerland, where I won't have net access. Assuming I survive the deprivation, I'll be back in two weeks. I hope you all have nice holidays, and I look forward to finding a few hundred patches in my mailbox when I get back... -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Re: Fix ntdll test
by Alexandre Julliard 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Hans Leidekker <hans(a)it.vu.nl> writes: > Uncomment some tests in rtlstr.c and wrap them in todo_wine{} instead. You can't do that, many of these tests succeed, which is not allowed inside todo_wine. And please try a 'make test' when you change a test, as already explained there's no point in submitting a patch that causes make test to fail. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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netapi32 and NetBIOS
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

[sent also to samba-technical mailing list] hi, i've just been alerted to the netbios work in wine (hooray!) as part of an effort to get the network neighbourhood going (yippee!). there is a problem, which i can help overcome. the problem is this: imagine that there is no TCP/IP stack in linux. imagine that TCP/IP runs in two separate user-space services, both of which are GPL'd: the TCP service is a fork-on-demand one that binds to all interfaces, and the UDP service is even worse, it's a single-process running a state machine. let's pretend that neither of the processes understand anything but Web services, and now you want to add SMTP, or worse, HTTPS. you have to consider hard-coding and linking into a paired monolith of programs, and you have a licensing and logistical nightmare that is totally unacceptable for practical purposes. this is the situation that is faced by wine, because samba, which consists of two programs, smbd and nmbd, "controls" the NetBIOS transport, from both a server _and_ (due to some bugs in Windows) also a client perspective. a flawed attempt to make it possible to cut-in to the NetBIOS equivalent of Dynamic-DNS-plus-DHCP (the NBNS system on port 137) was added in 2000 into nmbd, however from the Wine perspective this is totally useless because the code to access the bypass mechanism is GPL'd (tdb - trivial database). happily there is a convenient way round the mess, because it is possible to create the equivalent of a "Network Address Translation" service, and working code along these lines, which maintained a state machine of NetBIOS connections, was created over three years ago. nmbd needs to talk via this NAT service, so does nmblookup and, once the code is all there, so does Wine's Network Neighbourhood browsing code. at present, all you have to do to get the Wine "Network Neighbourhood" code to work is to disable samba, which is going to be totally impractical for most people. it is not _yet_ necessary for such a service to be created, but by the time the NetBIOS code in wine is released, it will _become_ necessary. if anyone wants to sponsor me [pay money] to revive the experiments i made in late 1999 / early 2000 in order to implement a NetBIOS "NAT" service, please contact me. l. -- -- expecting email to be received and understood is a bit like picking up the telephone and immediately dialing without checking for a dial-tone; speaking immediately without listening for either an answer or ring-tone; hanging up immediately and then expecting someone to call you (and to be able to call you). -- every day, people send out email expecting it to be received without being tampered with, read by other people, delayed or simply - without prejudice but lots of incompetence - destroyed. -- please therefore treat email more like you would a CB radio to communicate across the world (via relaying stations): ask and expect people to confirm receipt; send nothing that you don't mind everyone in the world knowing about...

1 0

uxtheme clips to much
by hatky 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

I know these are stubs but since they were added more of the splash screen and the top of the main application of Trillian has been cut off freeware at: http://download.com.com/3000-2150-10047473.html?part=trillian&subj=dlpagtag… home page at: http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/downloads/ Hatky. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/

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Extended window flag
by Fabian Cenedese 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Hi I have an application where I get the styles from a window with GetWindowLong(m_hWnd, GWL_EXSTYLE); In Windows I get 0x00000110 but in wine I get 0x40000110. From the wine headers (mine seem to old) I get this means 'managed by the system'. Is this something wine specific? Do I need to pay attention to this? If it's a valid Windows flag why isn't it set in Windows? If it's just wine specific can I just mask it out? Thanks bye Fabi

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Re: Running Wine under MS SFU under Wine ... ?
by ea＠iol.it 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

> My real point is - SFU is yet another set of windows > programs we can use to test wine, may as well grab a > copy while they're 'free'. SFU3 contains also the POSIX personality for NT/2k. Does Wine run native NT apps yet?

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Wine Segmentation fault
by Fabian Cenedese 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Hi I have a problem with starting wine itself. After trying the CodeWeavers wine I wanted to get clean again and removed everything I could find only slightly wine related (/usr/bin, /usr/local... etc). I even removed my cvs of wine of a few days ago. Then I made a fresh checkout and did the complete install with wineinstall. But still after this whole procedure I cannot start wine. Any ideas? Knoppix (Kernel 2.4.22) fabi@lx_fabi:/usr/local/bin$ gdb wine GNU gdb 5.3-debian Copyright 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc. .. snip .. This GDB was configured as "i386-linux"... (gdb) run Starting program: /usr/local/bin/wine Program received signal SIG32, Real-time event 32. 0x40046fc4 in pthread_getconcurrency () from /lib/libpthread.so.0 (gdb) bt #0 0x40046fc4 in pthread_getconcurrency () from /lib/libpthread.so.0 #1 0x40046e08 in pthread_getconcurrency () from /lib/libpthread.so.0 #2 0x400463f2 in pthread_create () from /lib/libpthread.so.0 #3 0x00110de6 in get_threading () at glibc.c:61 #4 0x00110e2e in main (argc=1, argv=0xbffffc74) at glibc.c:73 Thanks bye Fabi

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Re: PATCH: old freetype patch / FT_Get_First_Char
by Pouech Eric DMI AEI CAEN 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

> + if(!!pFT_Get_First_Char || (pFT_Get_First_Char( ft_face, &dummy ) < 0x100)) me thinks two bangs are one too much A+

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Re: Running Wine under MS SFU under Wine ... ?
by Dan Kegel 15 Dec '03

15 Dec '03

Greg wrote: > On Sunday 14 December 2003 09:02 pm, Dan Kegel wrote: > >>I recently posted with problems running Microsoft's >>Services for Unix under Wine. I only tried it out >>of morbid curiosity, actually, and because MS was >>offering it for free. The free offer expired, but >>it's back again for a little while; slashdot.org >>seems to be running banner ads for it. I'd encourage >>any of you who even *might* be tempted to try this >>out to go order the CD-ROM. It would be way bitchin' >>cool if we could nest Wine and MS SFU (I seem to recall >>we can't nest Wine in Cygwin for some technical reason, >>but who knows, maybe SFU won't have the same problem). > > Don't get your hopes up; they are nothing to write home about. OK, I have to confess, I was drunk when I wrote that :-) My real point is - SFU is yet another set of windows programs we can use to test wine, may as well grab a copy while they're 'free'. - Dan

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Re: Resend: Another fix for kernel file test
by Alexandre Julliard 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

Hans Leidekker <hans(a)it.vu.nl> writes: > Tested on Win2k and Win98. MoveFile returns ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS > when the destination exists. > > -Hans > > Changelog > MoveFile returns ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS, not ERROR_FILE_EXISTS You need to fix the code too, or add a todo_wine; I can't commit tests that fail. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

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Winmm resources and WINE Resource Compiler
by Steven Edwards 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

Hello, It seems the Wine Resource compiler accepts \"string\" in resources while windres and MS RC do not. I have updated the resources for winmm and wrc still accepts the proper handling of this ""string"". Can someone look at the sources for WRC and fix this? Thanks Steven Changelog: Porting fix for Winmm Resources (patch by Filip Navara) __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/

1 0

Allocating too much memory for prelink workaround
by Vincent Béron 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

Thinking about what Fabian and Marcus hit... Would it be possible to just have a dummy executable which allocates the 256MB chunk of memory from 11/22, linked to the same libs as the main wine-{k,p}thread, but having that executable not actually used? That way, we still gain the prelink workaround by reserving the memory, but Wine should continue to work on computers with less memory, or those who do not overcommit memory. Vincent

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Help w/fd_ops for SMB
by Juan Lang 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

Hi folks, I'm trying to modify Wine's SMB code to use Netbios(), rather than implementing NetBIOS-over-TCPIP itself. I'm having trouble figuring out how to handle the fd_ops in the wineserver. I was hoping for input. Currently, the SMB code creates a socket directly, and this socket is polled by the server for readability. Netbios() hides a connection behind an 8-bit adapter index and an 8-bit session index, so there's no way (through the Netbios() interface) to get the socket handle being used for a connection. Any opinions on whether (and if yes, how) the polling should be done? One possibility might be to figure out the TDI stuff, as using TDI for NetBIOS allows you to avoid the Netbios() interface. However, I haven't found any public documentation for the TDI interface to NetBIOS, except perhaps in the NT DDK (whose license I think is problematic). Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks, --Juan __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/

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Alsa 1.0 and Wine
by Brett I. Holcomb 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

I checked the archives and noticed the thread on Alsa 1.0. What was the resolution on that? I guess my concern is that for those of us that have 1.0 what happens if it's left for 0.9. I know with Winex it broke and I had to patch the winex alsa files. I used the quick and dirty method of modifying the header file but that is really a kluge and not long term. I have Alsa 1.0 installed so it works but it's not transportable to a system with 0.9. The better method is the patch that supports both interfaces so it doesn't matter what we have. I know I made the move to Alsa 1.0 because it does fix the oss emulation problem which has been bothering a lot of people. Thanks.

1 0

Printing with no printer
by Mike Hearn 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

Hi, It seems from reading the documentation that it's possible to print to a .ps file in Wine, even if you don't actually have a printer. However, I'm not sure how to do that - I've got far enough to get the "Couldn't find PPD file '/unix/path/to/PPD/file', expect a crash now!" message, but am not sure where to go from here. I don't have any PPD files, as I have no printer. Has anybody done this before? thanks -mike

2 1

win16 app crashes in SCROLL_GetScrollRange()
by Saulius Krasuckas 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

hi, once i got this crash. i have ve filled a bug report: http://bugs.winehq.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1503 now, inspired with a notice made by Andreas Mohr..: > Ah, WAIT!! Watcom has: > ./h/nt/winuser.h:#define SBM_GETRANGE 0x00E3 /*not in win3.1 */ .i decided to dig into some details. and i've stopped at one unclear state. wine has a patch in cvs: http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-patches/2003/03/0052.html which says: > As discussed with Alexandre, this patch makes the GetScroll* API > functions send a message to the Window in the case of SB_CTL scroll > bars. - if (!(infoPtr = SCROLL_GetScrollInfo( hwnd, nBar ))) - { - if (lpMin) lpMin = 0; - if (lpMax) lpMax = 0; - return FALSE; - } - if (lpMin) *lpMin = infoPtr->minVal; - if (lpMax) *lpMax = infoPtr->maxVal; - return TRUE; + /* Refer SB_CTL requests to the window */ + if (nBar == SB_CTL) + return SendMessageA(hwnd, SBM_GETRANGE, (WPARAM)lpMin, (LPARAM)lpMax); + else + return SCROLL_GetScrollRange(hwnd, nBar, lpMin, lpMax); may now i ask someone for a help or explanation? the question is: if the win16 doesn't handle SBM_GETRANGE message, should wine send it in a case of win16 app? if no, then i'd like to start writing an additional check ;-). and one more question. msdn states: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/shellcc/pl… If the nBar parameter is SB_CTL and the window specified by the hWnd parameter is not a system scroll bar control, the system sends the SBM_GETRANGE message to the window to obtain scroll bar information. This allows GetScrollRange to operate on a custom control that mimics a scroll bar. aren't we missing one more check here? maybe we need to check class-name of control targeted by hwnd? additional greps led me to: [s2@katleriai wine-cvs]$ grep -A10 Scrollbar.messages wine/include/wine/winuser16.h /* Scrollbar messages */ #define SBM_SETPOS16 (WM_USER+0) #define SBM_GETPOS16 (WM_USER+1) #define SBM_SETRANGE16 (WM_USER+2) #define SBM_GETRANGE16 (WM_USER+3) #define SBM_ENABLE_ARROWS16 (WM_USER+4) #define SBM_SETRANGEREDRAW16 WM_NULL /* Not in Win16 */ #define SBM_SETSCROLLINFO16 WM_NULL /* Not in Win16 */ #define SBM_GETSCROLLINFO16 WM_NULL /* Not in Win16 */ /* CBT hook structures */ any ideas about where these constants came from? googling with "-wine" keyword gave me NULL :-/.

5 7

Re: locale: Fix for too small buffers
by Vitaliy Margolen 14 Dec '03

14 Dec '03

Yep that is the problem I was seeing with one program I'm running. And this patch took care of it. Thanks! Vitaliy Margolen Tuesday, December 2, 2003, 13:01:18, Vitaliy Margolen wrote: > Hi, found a problem with the latest locale changes. When it calls the > GetLocaleInfoW() function, the attached error occurs. > This occurred because of the new code using the LOCALE_RETURN_NUMBER flag. The > problem is if the buffer supplied to get_registry_locale_info is quite small > (say sizeof(INT)). The value returned by NtQueryValueKey() however, is for a > string, and is much longer. As NtQueryValueKey updates the value of size, > this caused other parts of the code to corrupt memory.

3 4

msg.c:333: Test failed: ShowWindow:overlapped: in msg 0x0047 expecting wParam 0x47 got 0x0
by Uwe Bonnes 13 Dec '03

13 Dec '03

Hallo, running "make test" in "ddls/user/test", I get ../../../tools/runtest -q -P wine -M user32.dll -T ../../.. -p user32_test.exe.so msg.c && touch msg.ok msg.c:333: Test failed: ShowWindow:overlapped: in msg 0x0047 expecting wParam 0x47 got 0x0 make: *** [msg.ok] Error 1 This is on a Suse 9.0 system, SMP with two P3, kernel "Linux siemens 2.4.21-144-smp4G" Bye -- Uwe Bonnes bon(a)elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt --------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

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Re: config: add resources path
by Alexandre Julliard 13 Dec '03

13 Dec '03

Kevin Koltzau <kevin(a)plop.org> writes: > Many registry keys under XP refer to a %ResourceDir% env that points > to the path where windows themes are located. > > In case any apps refer to this, or if someone loads a registry > export from XP this should be available in wine also > > Interestingly, windows doesn't actually have this env set..my guess > is ExpandEnvironmentStrings has a special case to handle this > particular name I seriously doubt that; most likely it's something that is either handled internally in uxtheme, or uxtheme defines the variable before expanding the string. I think this needs more investigation, but it doesn't seem to be something that should be handled in kernel. -- Alexandre Julliard julliard(a)winehq.com

3 4

[Bug 939] We need a resolution for abandoned bugs
by Uwe Bonnes 13 Dec '03

13 Dec '03

Hallo, what about having a mechanisme that mails the bug autor after a given time, lets say 1/2 year, asking to reconfirm the bug. With no reaction from the bug author after some time ( several weeks), the bug is marked as abandonned. Bye -- Uwe Bonnes bon(a)elektron.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de Institut fuer Kernphysik Schlossgartenstrasse 9 64289 Darmstadt --------- Tel. 06151 162516 -------- Fax. 06151 164321 ----------

2 1

Delayed debug tracing
by Mike Hearn 13 Dec '03

13 Dec '03

Hi, I'd like to implement delayed debug tracing, by which I mean you can do a +relay,+seh,+tid,+win,+otherstuff and yet not create a log file so huge it's impossible to work with. I seem to recall seeing this feature in WineX, where you can press Alt-F12 to switch it on. Does anybody who knows the debugging/keyboard code have any particular preferences as to how this should be implemented? thanks -mike

5 8

Corrupted Wine source package on sf
by Vincent Béron 13 Dec '03

13 Dec '03

Hi Alexandre, The 20031212 source .tar.gz on sourceforge is shorter (~400k) than the one on ibiblio, and when untarred yields an error. You probably want to reupload it. Vincent

2 1

Internally maintained end-to-end API documentation
by Joshua Walker 13 Dec '03

13 Dec '03

Hello all, I have been a lurker, going on now a good part of three years. I have some ideas I wish to cast to the table. I am a writer, not a programmer by craft. This hindrance aside, I have kicked around my fair share of C code. I have also been known to throw gooey splatterings of VMS report data into Postgres, and somehow rationalize it into something coherent on the other side for pay. After reading Wine Weekly News Issue #200, (Congrats by the way), I stumbled across the Wine Status Pages. I particularly like how everything is grouped by major components. With a quick glance at a color-coded graph, one can see how well something has been implemented. There is one thing that really bugging the heck out of me. Most of the API documentation is possessed by MSDN. In my humble opinion, this is a very dangerous and volatile place to have it. I was once told that using the internet as a data resource is like watching The Library of Alexandria burn over and over again. Having attempted to be a code developer for Microsoft products in the past, I know how quick MSDN can be when it comes to pulling the data out from under your feet. I also know what it's like to go hunting for some bizarre functionality, only to have MSDN look at you back with nothing but a blank stare on it's face. Sometimes it's the "little things" like the deep inner workings of interprocess communication. Better yet, why on earth is my stack is being messed with after a function call. I think it's about time to take the various Windows APIs and place them onto a fishbowl for safe keeping. Having lurked here for as long as I have, I have found two constants about announcing projects on wine-devel that I'd like to share. 1) In order to have Alexandre change direction, you better have a very good reason. 2) Many ideas have been announced here with no real clear goal or steps of execution. They soon die of atrophy shortly after. As for myself, I'm thinking to taking up the mantle for documenting the Windows API, or at least setting up public facilties for myself and others to use. The problem I have is how about will it be documented? First goal is to figure out where on earth to *put* the documentation.. I'm thinking of some kind of universal data holder where API information can aggregated, parsed, and rendered to one's choosing. As I shook my magic hate-ball I asked, "What do you think about storing the API data in some kind of XMLish-thingy format?" All signs pointed to yes. This is quite tragic as my knowledge of XML is really weak. As far as I know, it's that HTML superset, isn't it? Stepping back a bit, I started thinking of tossing an SQL database on one of my machines and writing some kind of dynamic HTML front end for it. The SQL idea is nice because I can write the front end to spit out what I have in any data format I can dream of, including XML. It also allows people to come to my website, pop in an API function that wan't there, and move on with their lives. That seems plausible. The second hurtle is what to put as the actual fields. I'm really only used to seeing function rendered an a "Unix man style" format. Name, synopsis, description, return value, errors, bugs. See "man fork" for example. We will also need kind of a DLL overview, (man stdio?). What about something a little more UML compatible. Anyone have any ideas? Admittedly this is where my coherence of the project ends. There might be someone out there a little more apt at content than I am. Let me close with a story; When I was 12 my mother bought a brand new washing machine. My mother gave me the old one and a set of wrenches, and then proceeded to tell me to go nuts. In the span of five hours there was washing machine all over our front lawn. I learned more about about washing machines at the age of 12 by tearing that thing apart more than most adults know now. It's kinda what I want to do with Windows. -Joshua

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