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

[Stewart Gordon]

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.