Wiki guidance on taking function prototypes from ReactOS

Alex Henrie alexhenrie24 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 15 22:35:32 CDT 2022


Yesterday I came across a bug report [1] with an attached patch to
stub out the function RtlGetFullPathName_UEx, which is not documented
by Microsoft, based on its prototype in ReactOS. Alexandre left the
comment: [2]

"You should not look at ReactOS code at all, a lot of it is
reverse-engineered using methods that are not appropriate for Wine.
It's not a usable source of information for us."

The patch author, Ben, replied: [3]

"I just want the WIKI to be MUCH more definitive/precise on what IS
and IS NOT allowed."

I took a look and as it currently stands, the wiki clearly encourages
collaboration with ReactOS in at least one place: [4]

"If you're still resisting the switch to unix for some reason though,
you may have some luck investigating ReactOS (they cooperate with us
on API issues too)."

And it clearly discourages collaboration with ReactOS in at least one place: [5]

"it appears that all such documentation is derived from ReactOS, which
is not considered a legally safe source for use in Wine."

Mention of ReactOS is conspicuously absent from the page that outlines
Wine's "clean room" guidelines. [6]

Since Alexandre says that Wine developers shouldn't look at ReactOS
code at all, I think we should remove from the wiki all references
that might be construed to encourage it and add some more that
discourage it. Does anyone have any further thoughts before I start
editing?

-Alex

[1] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50464
[2] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50464#c6
[3] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50464#c7
[4] https://wiki.winehq.org/Cygwin_and_More
[5] https://wiki.winehq.org/AFD
[6] https://wiki.winehq.org/Clean_Room_Guidelines



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