Questions for developing functions

[David Elliott]

On 2002.01.20 03:36 Gerhard W. Gruber wrote:
> I have already posted this in the NG but I was told that this would be
> more
> appropriate here.
> 
> One of my questions is how wine developers actualy develop their
> functions.
> I'm aware that some functions are (rather) easily determind just because
> of
> their name (i.e. CreateFile). Other functions can be derived from reading
> the
> documentation but there is quite a number of functions that arenot
> documented
> and some are not even mentioned anywhere (like functions in the
> rpcnt.dll).
> Now I wonder how you go about this. My approach would be to disassemble
> such
> functions and see how they work. Of course I know that in some countries
> this
> will be illegal while it is not in others. If I live in a country where
> this
> is legal would it still be a problem for the maintainer if I submit a
> function
> that is written based on the method I used to get the knowledge to write
> it?
> How do you circumvent that problem that you might infringe copyright as
> reverse engineering is usually prohibited by the licence where this
> licence is
> actually legally binding.
> 

Well, if the code you contribute could be considered a derived work of the 
code you disassembled then you'd have problems.  But for instance if you 
disassembled for the purposes of figuring out how many arguments the 
function takes and what not but didn't actually directly write your code 
based on the disassembly, then you should be in the clear as far as that 
is concerned.

Now, as for the breaking of the license agreement on your software.  That 
mostly concerns you as you are the person under the license, not the Wine 
project.  So if you feel like you would get into legal trouble by even 
disassembling something to simply see what types of parameters it takes, 
then I would suggest that you didn't do it.  However if you feel that you 
would not get into legal trouble, and assuming you don't create your 
implementation directly from the disassembly (i.e. you reimplement from 
scratch, but just use the disassembly to get some ideas of function 
parameters) then you should be very much in the clear, and so should the 
wine project.

> Another question is concerning the function CreateDispTypeInfo. I'd like
> to
> work on Hotline which uses this function. As I noticed, this function is
> stubbed but not implemented and the last time it was worked on was
> somewhere
> in 2000, so I'd like to know if somebody is working on this. If I start
> work
> on it, do I have to submit this info somewhere in order to avoid
> duplicate
> work?
> 
Hey man, if no one responds in this mailing list within a reasonable 
timeframe then probably no-one is working on it.  Just have a go and if 
someone else beats you to it without saying anything you can always do a 
peer-review of the code and see if maybe something should be done 
different.  Two pairs of eyes are better than one.

-Dave