On 03/02/2017 10:45 PM, Austin English wrote:
On Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 1:58 PM, Joe ml999@openmailbox.org wrote:
Hi,
First of all, congrats for getting picked for another GSoC! Wine made my transition to Linux way easier and with more and more applications being supported the year of the desktop can come :)
My name is Joseph Winzer and I am a bachelor math/CS student looking forward to contribute to open source in this year's GSoC. The 'Resource/Dialog Editor' project caught my eye as I remember a few years back digging through executables out of curiousity. Last time I looked for a resource editor it was either bundled with other software (Visual Studio, PellesC) or as mentioned in the project description bundled up with adware like ResEdit. I want to change that by contributing to Wine with an open source standalone editor anyone can use free of charge. Equipped with my Petzold, MSDN and the help of the community I am sure I will be able to realize this project.
Looking forward working with you guys :)
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for your interest. Could you describe your experience with C/Wine a bit? Have you thought about how you would implement/design the resource editor at all? Could you share your plans?
Thanks for your reply.
So far, I experienced Wine exclusively from a user perspective, using it mostly for running games and apps I didn't find a substitute on Linux. I compiled Wine a few times when certain milestones were reached like improved D3D9 or bugfixes for certain apps. I did grep for stubs once in a while, browsed through the GDI implementation but wasn't confident enough to contribute.
I read more code than I wrote myself and most of it has been C or C-style C++. WinAPI-wise, I remember writing small games like connect four or apps where I tried to use what I had recently learned. I also did some reverse engineering for writing trainers or just for the fun of it. That has been awhile, though. More recently I looked at quake, tuxpaint, util-linux, .. whatever caught my interest.
Concerning the technical aspects of implementing the editor, I haven't given it much thought yet. MSDN et al provide enough documentation to tackle the task and problems can be dealt with once they come up (I assume in my naivete). Design-wise it depends on what the Wine community expects it to be but personally I imagined ResEdit trimmed to reading out and altering resources with dialog creation on top. From there it can be extended in whatever direction the community sees fit. The rough sketch would be as follows: * Establishing bare bones UI (sidebar for items, main window as viewer) * Read PE compatible file resources * Export resources * Modify resources (substitute images, edit items) * Refining UI for editing/viewing This covers the basic functionality of the resource viewer. The Dialog Editor provides rendering of dialog elements what would complement part of the resource viewer and exporting as .rc. My estimate is that the dialog editor will be the biggest part of the project with parsing resources, dialog rendering, layout, .. Overall the planning and focus of the project depends on what the community expects it to be and if there is an immediate use case it can cover in Wine or thought of as a general tool.
Sorry for the wall of text but I hope I could describe to you my idea I have for it. Of course, in the official application the gaps for the implementation will be filled but getting feedback from the community first makes planning also easier for me.