What's up with the windows headers?

[Stewart Gordon]

On 26/12/2012 20:22, Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 12/26/12, Phil Lavoie <maidenphil at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> Makes sense, do you know of any plans to merge those with the dmd
>> distributables?
>
> It was discussed many times. I don't know if the Phobos team is
> willing to merge the dsource.org WinAPI in its current layout.
> WinAPI has aliases to Ascii/Unicode versions of functions which
> they don't like (or maybe it's just Walter who doesn't like it),

Any recollection of why?  Besides, if Walter just doesn't like these 
aliases, he doesn't have to use them.

> and it has a directory and file structure. Putting this whole API
> into a single file would be insane (it would be a 70.000 lines
> file). And the other problem is that currently DMD is distributed
> with all header and binary files for all OSes, so adding WinAPI
> would increase the size of the .zip file.

It seems common to bundle full Windows API headers with C(++) compilers 
- indeed, even DMC seems to (though they seem to be very out of date). 
So why not D compilers just as well?

> We should have separate packages for each OS,

I agree.

> but Walter is in charge of making them so I don't know when things
> will improve.
>
> Personally I'm tired of discussing this as the discussions always
> reach a stale-mate.

Indeed, it's time a positive effort were made.  At least for the time 
being, document the incompleteness properly and in doing so point people 
to the WindowsAPI project.  I'll try and come up with a proposal for how 
this should be done.

Stewart.