Ove Kaaven ovehk@ping.uio.no
On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 17:30, Jon Brandenburg wrote:
Am I allowed to run debug os in connection with say a piece of test code, with the purpose of extracting the necessary api information/functionality so it can be rewritten into wine
In what way would the debug version help you with that compared to the non-debug version?
I have no idea about the details of Windows debug versions. But I guess the debug files may contain a lot of additional informations such as symbol names of internal functions which are normally stripped.
As that and seeing the hesitations of accepting code which is suspected in the slightest way to be directly derived from dissasembly into Wine, I guess using this information is certainly not encouraged and probably not advisable to avoid possible legal issues. I don't think any party contributing to Wine is really prepared nor willing to test the legality of this in court.
Rolf Kalbermatter
On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 14:21, Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
Ove Kaaven ovehk@ping.uio.no
On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 17:30, Jon Brandenburg wrote:
Am I allowed to run debug os in connection with say a piece of test code, with the purpose of extracting the necessary api information/functionality so it can be rewritten into wine
In what way would the debug version help you with that compared to the non-debug version?
I have no idea about the details of Windows debug versions. But I guess the debug files may contain a lot of additional informations such as symbol names of internal functions which are normally stripped.
Yes, but how would that help? If you just write some test code to see how an API behaves (what it returns, what effects it has) in various situations, like Wine's conformance testing framework does, then you're never going to see that additional debug information anyway, so it won't make much of a difference. (Well, except that the debug version probably also contains additional sanity checks so that it will return errors on invalid input more often, perhaps.)
Or do you plan to single-step through the Windows code? That's the only case I can think of that debug information becomes useful in this context, but I'm not sure if that practice would be encouraged whether or not you use the debug version. In Europe it should be legal for purposes of interoperability, but it's still best to avoid it to the extent possible.
Ove Kaaven [mailto:ovehk@ping.uio.no] wrote:
On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 14:21, Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
Ove Kaaven ovehk@ping.uio.no
On Sun, 2003-09-07 at 17:30, Jon Brandenburg wrote:
Am I allowed to run debug os in connection with say a piece of test code, with the purpose of extracting the necessary api information/functionality so it can be
rewritten into wine
In what way would the debug version help you with that
compared to the
non-debug version?
I have no idea about the details of Windows debug versions.
But I guess
the debug files may contain a lot of additional
informations such as symbol
names of internal functions which are normally stripped.
Yes, but how would that help? If you just write some test code to see how an API behaves (what it returns, what effects it has) in various situations, like Wine's conformance testing framework does, then you're never going to see that additional debug information anyway, so it won't make much of a difference. (Well, except that the debug version probably also contains additional sanity checks so that it will return errors on invalid input more often, perhaps.)
I assumed a good disassembler may be able to match the *.dbg information with the disassembled code to make it more readable. Seems like something the IDA people probably have thought of, if it would be possible. I have no experience however in any way with this, nor if it is possible, nor available at all. I only played with the trial edition of an already outdated version of IDA a little.
Or do you plan to single-step through the Windows code? That's the only case I can think of that debug information becomes useful in this context, but I'm not sure if that practice would be encouraged whether or not you use the debug version. In Europe it should be legal for purposes of interoperability, but it's still best to avoid it to the extent possible.
Well I do have had some issues in the past, not necessarily Wine related, which I wouldn't know how to research without a little single stepping. However stepping through more than a few hundred bytes of assembly is really not an option I would like to do.
In general I agree with you, if possible try to stay away from disassembly or debugging information as it may not only be a legal problem but sometimes also misleading.
Rolf Kalbermatter
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Ove Kaaven -
Rolf Kalbermatter