On 08/04/2010 03:15 PM, Francois Gouget wrote:
On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Max TenEyck Woodbury wrote: [...]
This has been discussed elsewhere on this mailing list.
There is a lot of information specific to Wine, particularly its internal structure, that is not shared with Microsoft's product. Further, there is a little confusing and incorrect information in the Microsoft documentation. Bluntly, the Microsoft documentation is what they want it to be. We need to document what it really is.
I think such documentation should be open to all projects involved in the Win32 space such as Mingw, React OS, as well as Windows software developpers whenever they are irritated by an MSDN deficiency.
Sure there will be differences between how each project implements a given API, just like there are differences between the Windows 98, 2000 or Vista implementations. But I expect most of the documentation to be common to all so that the best approach would be to describe the reference behavior and then have notes describing the platform-specific differences.
However calling the Wiki 'WineAPI' is not very welcoming to other contributors and it would be a shame if each project ended up duplicating this huge effort just because of a naming issue.
That is a very good point!
There several things that have to be coordinated however:
- This is not just the API documentation. It includes a great deal of information about the meta-structure of the Wine project. Easy access to that meta-information might be one of the more useful aspects of this sub-project.
- The detailed information is, at least initially, coming out of the Wine code. It is being generated using scripts. The scripts are very likely to be rerun when a file in the Wine repository changes. It may take a lot of effort to merge the new information with information from other sources.
- If the licenses are compatible, it should be possible to copy articles between projects. Also, the page tree structure is based on the structure of the Wine repository. Since the Wine repository structure is fairly stable, (new parts are added fairly often, but once a piece is in place for a while, it usually stays where it is. I could definitely be wrong about this!) links into the WineAPI wiki should also be stable.
- Max