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

[Sascha Katzner]

Stewart Gordon wrote:
> I'm not sure I know what you mean.  Are you basically talking about 
> extracting the structure definitions and function prototypes from the
>  headers, and then putting them into new headers created from 
> scratch?

Yes.

> Where does hand-tweaking someone else's headers fall into your 
> argument? This is the approach I'm using.  I think there are also a 
> few people running the headers through an automated tool and then 
> hand-tweaking the output.

I think it depends on the source of the headers and how far you define 
hand-tweaking. If you use an automated tool you shouldn't use the 
original m$ headers in any case, because this could violate the 
intellectual property of m$. It's safer in this case to use the public 
domain MinGW headers.

On the other hand if someone would (pure hypothetical) use an automated 
tool on original m$ headers and hand-tweak the result (delete the 
comments and reformat it, perhaps also rename parameter names), no one 
could distinguish the result from a pure rewrite from scratch via hand. 
...I think this would be in a gray zone.

>> Because this was the way, the MinGW Team created their header 
>> files, I realy see no reason that we couldn't go that way.
> 
> What is your source for this statement?

I really see no other way they could have created their files, if
reverse engineering is off-limits.

LLAP,
Sascha