Marshalling code for me to use?

[Greg Turner]

On Thursday 17 October 2002 03:19 pm, Ove Kaaven wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Greg Turner wrote:
> > Before I go off and duplicate a bunch of work somebody already did,
> > I wanted to verify that wine has no existing implementation of NDR data
> > marshalling?  I don't know of such a thing, but I don't necessarily have
> > the big picture.  rpcrt4 needs this for somewhat obvious reasons, and the
> > format is well documented by OpenGroup if we need to start an
> > implementation from scratch.
>
> The format may be standard, but the API that rpcrt4 use is pretty
> undocumented (apart from the self-documenting function names and pretty
> complete header files). I was planning to work on this stuff again soon,

my goodness, tell me about it!  at least some of them have entertaining
names like I_RpcTransServerMaxFrag ;)

> but haven't yet written any more code than what you've merged (and I would
> probably begin spending time mapping more RPC format chars by writing some
> IDL, feeding it through MIDL, studying the output, and update
> include/wine/rpcfc.h, or I would spend time typing in stuff like a Wine
> version of wtypes.idl, so might take even longer before I got to write any
> marshalling code), 

the format chars have a bit of documentation in MSDN Library. It's a little
confusing and terse but much better than nothing, and, so far,
consistent with what I see coming from MIDL.  Kinda surprising that they 
bothered to document the format since they don't document what to do 
with it :)

BTW, I assume that MIDL-generated code can't go into wine? I plan to
avoid the issue by generating proxy/stub code in wetware, with corresponding
IDL so we can eventually replace wetware-generated proxy/stub code with 
widl-generated equivalents...

Anyhoo... I don't like to bang out code without being able to run it and see that
it works.  So I'm leaning towards an incremental approach.  That's why I've
been playing with "hello world" and the unit-testing framework.  OTOH, I don't
want to pile crap on the foundation you've built, so I will tread with caution.

> and I don't know about anyone else working on it
> (Juergen Schmied is probably busy with other stuff). So if you want to
> start on it, go ahead, I'll give you all the help I can (as long as time
> permits, and the license of your work remains ReWind-compatible), my
> employer wants to see a functional RPC/DCOM infrastructure in Wine...

It would be unfortunate for both of us to work on the same
parts of this at the same time and create a merge situation, so let me
know if you start diving into it and we'll work out some way not to step
on each other's toes.  I appreciate your offer to help out, I won't
hesitate to take you up on it!  If ignorance is bliss, I should be a happy
guy...

As for licensing, I will release everything as X11 for now.  X11 seems to
allow all the major wine forks to absorb my code, which would be my 
preference.

-- 
gmt