Call for Volunteers (Re: Newbie work?)

[Francois Gouget]

   Hi,


On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Daniel Sabo wrote:

> I noticed that there was a file on
> ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/ALPHA/wine/ about projects for newbie wine
> developers. I also noticed that it was written in 1994. So I was wondering
> if there was a more up to date version or if anyone had some ideas of
> usefull work that a developer new to wine could do?


   Unfortunately this file does not seem very helpful. Time for another
round of my Call for Volunteers it seems :-)
   Note that I did not get much time to update it so please send me your
ideas. Also I'm thinking about starting an additional section for
'hard(er)' projects that would significantly improve Wine. Maybe it
could also list projects that are already underway and for which help
would be appreciated (DCOM?, STRICT handles?).

   But first, many thanks go to all those who fixed bugs from the
previous call for volunteers and especially to Maciek Kaliszewski for
his wrc fixes.

   What is the "Call for Volunteers"?
   I have built a list of projects that should be easy to tackle by new
Wine developpers. The main goal is to provide the needed inspiration to
potential Wine developpers that just are not motivated by the standard
'grep FIXME' answer (and I can understand them).
   So here goes.


Easy:

 * PrgWin95/98: System metrics differ from the Win9x values
   #48: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=48
   One day I'll fix this one... I swear. Unless you want to work on
   it first. In that case I'll provide you with my test application and
   dumps of the metrics for Win95, Win98, NT4, 2000, ...

 * The doc about the command line arguments and the config file is out
   of date. See TextCP, XVideoPort and Synchronous for instance. I'm
   sure there are plenty of other things that are out of date.

 * Metabug: Test Wine with the VXCL samples
   #242: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=242
   Get the VXCL samples, test them with Wine and report the bugs in the
   bugzilla database. I know there's lots of them. Then people (or
   yourself) can start fixing these bugs in a distributed fashion.
   You can probably start reporting the most obvious bugs just by
   testing in Wine, but for more subtle bugs you will need two
   computers (or Win4Lin/VmWare) to more easily compare the behavior in
   Windows and in Wine.

 * Metabug: Test Wine with the Common Control Spy Samples
   #239: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239
   Get the Common Control Spy samples and test Wine with them. You
   will need the native comctl32 dll but you can do the tests
   without rebooting between each test or using two computers.

 * PrgWin95: Listbox getting a recessed border instead of a flat one
   #56: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56
   (I can provide you with the sample application)
   This one my be fixed, to check...

 * I think it would be nice to add a tool that displays the dlls version
   information like 'About' does in the windows explorer. I have some
   code you could use as a starting point and I think it could be
   merged with winver. In fact this would be almost stabdard windows
   programming.

 * Tabs are missing their inner border
   #243: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=243
   There's a bug in the drawing of the border of the common control
   tabs. Fixing each of the four instances of the code is easy. It would
   be interesting to find a way to factorize some of this code.


Medium (I expect these would take longer or be a bit harder)

 * Quickbooks Pro Timer does not accept date (GetCalendarInfoA error)
   #276: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=276
   GetCalendarInfoA/W are not implemented yet. They involve
   quite a lot of internationalisation aspects, but providing a
   first implementation that at least handles the common cases
   should be feasible.

 * Provide a pedump utility
   #91: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=91
   I know there's sample code that does that already floating around so
   it should be relatively simple.
   Eric Pouech seems to be working on this. I did not check if his
   pedump dump the imports/exports but it probably does.

 * CreateIcon does not resize bitmaps
   #175: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=175
   I did a similar fix somewhere some time ago. I can provide a
   sample application and I might be able to point you in the right 
   direction.

 * winemaker: 'winemaker --nomfc' does not have the intended effect
   #227: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=227

 * winemaker: Ignores the '--with-{mfc,wine}' options once they are
   cached
   #225: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=225
   If you're familiar with autoconf and know how configure scripts
   should behave...

 * StrokePath ignores PS_JOIN_xxx
   #11: http://wine.codeweavers.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=11
   This should not be too difficult to fix but it would certainly help
   if you are familiar with GDI.

 * Checking the differences between what's in the Windows dlls and
   what's in our spec files... and fix the contents of our spec files
   as appropriate. I already have a list of all the APIs in each of 
   the dlls for Win95, Win98, NT4 and Wine2000, plus a script that 
   can show the differences.

 * Enhancing the above perl script. In particular it could be made
   smarter wrt. detecting whether an API is exported by ordinal or not.


--
Francois Gouget         fgouget at free.fr        http://fgouget.free.fr/
                  Hiroshima '45 - Czernobyl '86 - Windows '95