Round-up of the recent WindowsAPI discussions from when I wasn't looking

[Anders Bergh]

OT: some say headers / interfaces can't be copyrighted, is that false?
I wrote this reply with my phone so I apologize if it sends as html or so...

On 8/28/07, Stewart Gordon <smjg_1998 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I was away for a week or two recently, so it's no wonder I didn't catch some
> of the discussion while it was actually happening.  Some of it was also
> where I don't tend to look: the Dsource forums.
>
> http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=56630
>
> This started as a discussion on how COM interfaces are handled, though it
> isn't clear whether the claim that something was wrong was done by actual
> testing or mere manual reading of the code.  But some more general
> discussion on the WindowsAPI project then began.  I've just posted a few
> responses there; I'll just round it up here.
>
> At the moment, the Wiki4D page
>
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?WindowsAPI
>
> is the official one.  There have been suggestions to migrate it to the
> Dsource Bindings wiki; I'll probably have a go at doing this over the next
> few days.  This would also be a good time to split it up as has also been
> suggested.  The wiki would become the sole home of the translation
> instructions, rather than having it duplicated in the readme.txt file.
>
> One question remains: What should we do with all the old discussion from the
> current wiki page?
>
>
> These threads have appeared on the dsource forum:
>
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2253
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2538
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2937
> http://www.dsource.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2991
>
> but there isn't much that needs to be said to round up these discussions.
> Though there's something about the makefile in there, which is included in
> what follows.
>
>
> There are a few issues with recent changes to the WindowsAPI modules.
>
> For some reason I can't imagine, WeirdCat decided to rewrite vfw.d from
> scratch.  He/she/it didn't even indicate what it's a translation of, but
> replaced the line "Translated from MinGW Windows headers" with "written in
> the D programming language".  It may be true that the MinGW header is a
> disaster area, but in the same discussion it was pointed out that vfw ought
> to be deleted as it's an obsolete API.
>
> Another contribution by WeirdCat is a makefile that doesn't work.  One of
> the threads on the Dsource forum revealed the problem: it uses GNU-specific
> syntax.  There seems to be no reason for this.  This being a D project, it
> should be fully compatible with the Digital Mars tools among others.
>
> Clw has retranslated the D3D9 stuff from Microsoft's own headers.  The
> commit message was: "Updated d3d9 headers to D3D9Ex and corrected some
> errors".  Somebody or other took the words out of my mouth by stating that
> it was wrong to put in something that's derived from Microsoft's copyrighted
> headers.  This project is meant to be public domain.
>
>
> When this project was started, MinGW 3.6 was current.  Now the current
> version of MinGW is 3.9.  But at the moment there's no marking of what's
> been updated to the new stuff.  We need to make it our policy to include the
> MinGW version number in each file's heading comment.
>
> And to simplify the process of updating the modules, we could do with a set
> of diffs between MinGW 3.6 and 3.9....
>
>
> Comments?
>
> Stewart.
>
>