Clarification regarding clean room guidelines and headers / prototypes

[Fabian Maurer]

Hello,

Not sure who, apart from Alexandre, could help here, but I wanted to ask for
some clarification on the clean room guidelines (https://gitlab.winehq.org/
wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines)

Let's say we want to add a few new COM classes / interfaces from WinRT for
some program. What is the official way to get those header definitions? Copy
paste from the official SDK?

Or worse, there is some windows adjacent dlls that only contain typelibs - can
we decompile those typelibs to get the COM interface definitions?

Or how about undocumented functions that are documented by third parties? ROS
is off limits, all others as well? There are for example C# projects that
provide P/Invoke definitions of otherwise undocumented functions.

I think it would be helpful for the wiki to be updated with a bit of
clarification.

Thanks in advance,
Regards,
Fabian Maurer

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Data dump and programmatic dump from decompilation and even some other form of data dump is off-limit... I think perhaps sometimes (some of the) wine people are taking it quite strictly.
For example, a while ago, I filed an issue about cp932/cp936/cp950/etc are not exactly the same as the unicode consortium's big5/jis/gb to unicode mappings - Microsoft for historical or whatever reasons have codepages which are not 100% identical to unicode consortium's mapping. I wrote a little program to just loop over the mapping and run it on windows, output it to text, and attached them to a bug report - and promptly had the attachments deleted from bugzilla as "you cannot dump window's data structure". But how else can you do it if you want an exact match of behavior? For my purpose then (for MS windows compliance/compatibility as far as a font's encoding coverage goes), I needed an exact match - it must be MS cp* exactly, and not the "approximately the same" unicode consortium mapping...
I think the bugzilla issue is still open, but I haven't checked recently.
    On Thursday 12 December 2024 at 21:49:53 GMT, Fabian Maurer  wrote:

Hello,

Not sure who, apart from Alexandre, could help here, but I wanted to ask for
some clarification on the clean room guidelines (https://gitlab.winehq.org/
wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines)

Let's say we want to add a few new COM classes / interfaces from WinRT for
some program. What is the official way to get those header definitions? Copy
paste from the official SDK?

Or worse, there is some windows adjacent dlls that only contain typelibs - can
we decompile those typelibs to get the COM interface definitions?

Or how about undocumented functions that are documented by third parties? ROS
is off limits, all others as well? There are for example C# projects that
provide P/Invoke definitions of otherwise undocumented functions.

I think it would be helpful for the wiki to be updated with a bit of
clarification.

Thanks in advance,
Regards,
Fabian Maurer

[Nikolay Sivov]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 11:43 PM Hin-Tak Leung 
wrote:
> Data dump and programmatic dump from decompilation and even some other
> form of data dump is off-limit... I think perhaps sometimes (some of the)
> wine people are taking it quite strictly.
>
> For example, a while ago, I filed an issue about cp932/cp936/cp950/etc are
> not exactly the same as the unicode consortium's big5/jis/gb to unicode
> mappings - Microsoft for historical or whatever reasons have codepages
> which are not 100% identical to unicode consortium's mapping. I wrote a
> little program to just loop over the mapping and run it on windows, output
> it to text, and attached them to a bug report - and promptly had the
> attachments deleted from bugzilla as "you cannot dump window's data
> structure". But how else can you do it if you want an exact match of
> behavior? For my purpose then (for MS windows compliance/compatibility as
> far as a font's encoding coverage goes), I needed an exact match - it must
> be MS cp* exactly, and not the "approximately the same" unicode consortium
> mapping...
>
> I think the bugzilla issue is still open, but I haven't checked recently.

This should be resolved now, we are now using mappings files published by
Microsoft to generate binary mapping files.
> On Thursday 12 December 2024 at 21:49:53 GMT, Fabian Maurer <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> Not sure who, apart from Alexandre, could help here, but I wanted to ask
> for
> some clarification on the clean room guidelines (
> https://gitlab.winehq.org/
> wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines)
>
> Let's say we want to add a few new COM classes / interfaces from WinRT for
> some program. What is the official way to get those header definitions?
> Copy
> paste from the official SDK?
>
> Or worse, there is some windows adjacent dlls that only contain typelibs -
> can
> we decompile those typelibs to get the COM interface definitions?
>
> Or how about undocumented functions that are documented by third parties?
> ROS
> is off limits, all others as well? There are for example C# projects that
> provide P/Invoke definitions of otherwise undocumented functions.
>
> I think it would be helpful for the wiki to be updated with a bit of
> clarification.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Regards,
> Fabian Maurer

[Alexandre Julliard]

Fabian Maurer  writes:
> Hello,
>
> Not sure who, apart from Alexandre, could help here, but I wanted to ask for
> some clarification on the clean room guidelines (https://gitlab.winehq.org/
> wine/wine/-/wikis/Clean-Room-Guidelines)
>
> Let's say we want to add a few new COM classes / interfaces from WinRT for
> some program. What is the official way to get those header definitions? Copy
> paste from the official SDK?

You can look at the headers but you can't copy/paste them wholesale.
> Or worse, there is some windows adjacent dlls that only contain typelibs - can
> we decompile those typelibs to get the COM interface definitions?

Again, you can look at some specific definitions, but you can't use the
decompiled typelib directly.
> Or how about undocumented functions that are documented by third parties? ROS
> is off limits, all others as well? There are for example C# projects that
> provide P/Invoke definitions of otherwise undocumented functions.

You can look for some hints about undocumented functions, but the right
way is to write test cases.