RPC marshalling patch

[Gregory M. Turner]

On Friday 31 January 2003 02:22 am, Ove Kaaven wrote:
> > http://www.opengroup.org/products/publications/catalog/t151x.htm
>
> I can't find any legalese there to the effect of signing away my
> firstborn, they seem to just want purchase details. Care to elaborate?
> (And is it still okay for me to code on Wine even if my firstborn can't?)
>
> > and here is some free-as-in-beer RPC 1.1 stuff:
> >
> > http://www.opengroup.org/products/publications/catalog/c706.htm
>
> And on there, they just want to borg the email addresses of every reader,
> but not their souls or firstborns, as far as I can see.

hehe, you are correct, they are more like, say, the Borland Community site 
than Rumplestiltskin.

Of course, I was kidding about signing away your firstborn, although you do at 
least sign away any redistribution rights by downloading the free stuff.  
AFAIK OpenGroup/DCE controls the RPC spec -- expecting consumers to sign an 
NDA or something would kind of defeat their stated purpose of enhancing 
interoperability.

There is one really significant open question left by their documentation: 
what is the gap between "MSRPC" and DCE RPC?  I still can't decide whether 
this difference is just an API-level difference, or a full-blown 
wire-protocol incompatibility....  Luckily, we probably don't care too much 
-- ultimately, if we can make something that interoperates with Windows, we 
win, regardless of how well MS complied with the spec.

The other thing I can't stand about their spec is the rediculous protocol 
state diagram style they use.  Could they have /possibly/ made it more 
confusing and obscure?  (Surely, the answer is yes, but it's pretty darn 
confusing).

But, it helps.  I shouldn't complain, considering what I paid for it.  
Combined with the pseudo-documentation of the format strings from MSDN, the 
Microsoft headers and MIDL output, the DCERPC source, tcpdump, etc., there's 
enough comprehensible clues out there to actually accomplish something -- it 
still feels pretty sparse to me, but I guess there's nothing I can do about 
that but forge ahead (or maybe shell out for the DCE package :) )

--gmt