On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Jürgen Schmied wrote:
And do what? As I said above wintrnl.h can't include ntddk.h.
Of course we can just include it as it is and don't use it...
I would do nothing as long as nobody needs it. There are
many *.h files
in the SDK that we don't have and nobody missed them till today.
Missing headers are making the lives of Winelib users pretty hard: the first time they try to compile their application they get tons of errors. They first wonder what they are doing wrong, then why Wine does things differently from Windows, is there a hidden reason, and then how the hell they are going to fix the headers and their messy dependencies and whether they should not rather completely give up.
Fully agreed. Every header that it missing or wrong (even if fixing it is trivial) is a potential: "Sorry boss, I tried to compile our application with WineLib but it didn't work. So we can't port our applications using WineLib.".
Now, I'm not saying we should spend all our time trying to make sure our headers are perfect rather than improving binary emulation. As with everything this is a question of balance.
I have being planning a long time to write a Perl script that compares the Microsoft SDK headers with the Wine headers. I just haven't got around to do it... So don't hold your breath.
Now concerning this header, since it's so new (and quite useless) it certainly isn't going to be a problem soon and as you pointed out we definitely have other header issues to tackle first. Still if we can find an easy nice solution, let's go for it (unfortunately that does not appear to be the case).
The easy solution is to include the header just as I have submitted it and not use it at all or rather postponing the problem of using it or not to the future. If it exists somebody might get some ideas, some day...
Note that you can use it as long as you don't include ntdef.h or ntddk.h as well so the non-core DLLs should be able to use it without any problem.
Nether the less I would strongly advise that the non-core DLLs doesn't use it either unless it REALLY, REALLY, REALLY must...
Patrik Stridvall ps@leissner.se writes:
The easy solution is to include the header just as I have submitted it and not use it at all or rather postponing the problem of using it or not to the future. If it exists somebody might get some ideas, some day...
But this won't really address the issue; if we don't use the header it will most likely get broken by something and nobody will notice, and then when someone uses it in Winelib we have the same problem.
I think we should add the header and use it instead of ntddk.h where possible. This probably requires adding/moving definitions to it that are currently in ntddk.h, but that's acceptable as long as they are exported under Windows anyway. And it's better to follow the SDK than the DDK where we can, since this is what apps we want to build with Winelib will be using too.
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Alexandre Julliard -
Patrik Stridvall