I'm in trouble trying to estimate effort needed to implement marshalling interoperable with MS. Is it a right task for 2-2.5 months of Google's "Summer of Code"?
DCOM is a much larger project requiring some degree of infrastructure work that would be difficult for a person new to the Wine codebase and new to COM. So DCOM is probably out of reach, but the underlying protocol, DCE/RPC is probably right for 2-2.5 months of work.
Robert, thank you for clarification.
I'm interested in Wine's DCOM in a long term because I have a big task: I need to port to Linux some complex commercial middleware and a couple of apps based on it. These apps employ DCOM heavily.
The work will involve parsing MIDL format strings and marshaling/unmarshaling data correctly to/from a buffer. The project should be easier for a new, but bright coder who hasn't yet built up a knowledge of Win32 / POSIX APIs than many other projects.
I could provide a test program that exercises and certain number of Ndr types and say "make this work". We could vary the number of types to vary the amount of work.
It will be very helpful if you provide this test program.
Robert, thank you for accurate and clear definition of an intermediate goal.