reverse engineering

[Stefan Leichter]

Hello,

if i use a debugger to find the number of parameters of an undocumented 
function, will a patch based on this knowledge be accepted in wine ?

Is this the normal way to deal with undocumented stuff? Or is it better to 
make a test program that prints the stack pointer before and after the call 
to the undocumented function?

Bye Stefan

[Mike Hearn]

On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 10:37, Stefan Leichter wrote:
> if i use a debugger to find the number of parameters of an undocumented 
> function, will a patch based on this knowledge be accepted in wine ?

My understanding is that this is acceptable. The only problems arise
when somebody actually tries to decompile Microsofts code and submit
that to Wine - clearly this is violating copyright. Just investigating
the interfaces should be fine though.
> Is this the normal way to deal with undocumented stuff? Or is it better to 
> make a test program that prints the stack pointer before and after the call 
> to the undocumented function?

Well sometimes you can find things in the headers. The problem with
looking at the debugger is that you have only a vague idea of what types
arguments are. Some parts of our ntdll for instance have "stub"
arguments where we don't know what they actually are.

thanks -mike

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Stefan Leichter"  wrote:
> if i use a debugger to find the number of parameters of an undocumented 
> function, will a patch based on this knowledge be accepted in wine ?
>
> Is this the normal way to deal with undocumented stuff? Or is it better to 
> make a test program that prints the stack pointer before and after the call 
> to the undocumented function?

In the most cases +snoop helps a lot with that task.