Question regarding development..

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Ove Kaaven [mailto:ovehk at ping.uio.no] wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 14:21, Rolf Kalbermatter wrote:
> > Ove Kaaven <ovehk at 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outdated version of IDA a little.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