Is it possible to workout or read the API's that a specific Windows application use ?
The theory is that it would be possible to estimate the amount of work needed to get a Windows app to work on Wine by calculating the number of API's that is not working or only half working and estimating the time it would take to correct these API's.
By running wine-debug it is possible to get the API's used by an application. I'm hoping that there is some simpler way (although I'm not holding my breath) to read the API's used by an application directly from the .exe or .dll.
I'm working on a utility that would collect this information and estimate the number of man hours it would take to get an application running on Wine. Also I'm hoping to build a utility that can collect stats on the API's being used in an application as well.
The idea is to build a web page with these statistics for the applications that people want to run on a wine installation. If we can get some participation on the work and completeness of an API. It should be able to build a pretty accurate picture of the amount of work that needs to be done to get an app running under Wine.
There is some other interesting side effects that I will not elaborate on until I have something in place (this is very simple but time does not permit. Somebody feels better equip to do this please say so)
If not I will probably get arround to doing something this weekend.
Cu jacobus@kewlconcepts.co.za
The theory is that it would be possible to estimate the amount of work needed to get a Windows app to work on Wine by calculating the number of API's that is not working or only half working and estimating the time it would take to correct these API's.
This would maybe work for all 'old-style' Win32 APIs... But as more and more new APIs are exported via COM, it's starting to get impossible to get 'static' counting of what is used.
Lionel
On Tue, 18 May 2004, Lionel Ulmer wrote:
The theory is that it would be possible to estimate the amount of work needed to get a Windows app to work on Wine by calculating the number of API's that is not working or only half working and estimating the time it would take to correct these API's.
This would maybe work for all 'old-style' Win32 APIs... But as more and more new APIs are exported via COM, it's starting to get impossible to get 'static' counting of what is used.
And then there's Windows messages (WM_CLOSE, etc.). Each of these may or may not be implemented, may or may not be sent at the right time, may or may not be sent the right number of times, etc.
Then there's the tools like regsvr32, regedit and wcmd which are sometimes used during the install.
In fact, most of the time it's not missing APIs that prevent an application from working, and it's not implementing whichever API happens to be missing that takes time either. It's all the rest of the bug fixing.
However, gather statistics for a bunch of applications and you will get a map of which APIs are used most often. And that could be interesting from a geeky point of vue, but also, maybe, to help us know where to focus code reviews, etc.
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Francois Gouget -
Jacobus Erasmus -
Lionel Ulmer