Subject: RE: To whom do we contribute API header/
From: [email-masked] (Marcus Brown)

15 Jul 1998 20:58:09 -0700
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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To: Larry Hall <[email-masked]>, Geoffrey Noer <[email-masked]>,
        Robin Crampton <[email-masked]>, [email-masked],
        [email-masked]

Isn't there a way (or a process that was proposed) that would allow you
to "patch" or "massage" the MS Platform SDK header files to use with
cygwin32?  AFAIK the Platform SDK is freely available from Microsoft,
and this would seem to be a logical way to go instead of recreating each
header file.  I could see problems with import libraries, but maybe it's
possible to incorporate the ms-compat binutils or use another method.
I'm not certain, maybe this is more on the mingw32 side of cygwin32...

Marcus

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Hall [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 1998 8:48 AM
To: Geoffrey Noer; Robin Crampton; [email-masked];
[email-masked]
Subject: Re: To whom do we contribute API header/

At 07:48 AM 7/13/98 +0000, Geoffrey Noer wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 10, 1998 at 11:05:58AM +0000, Robin Crampton wrote:
>[...]
>> How different do the cygwin32 Windows header files have to be from   
>> Microsofts to not infringe copyright, or whatever?  Can we just strip
out   
>> all the comments and expand all the typedefs (well, obviously not all
the   
>> typedefs, just the simple ones such as DWORD) ?  Do we even need to
do   
>> that?  I imagine it's hard to enforce copyright on data structure   
>> definitions and function prototypes.
>
>To the best of my knowledge, all of our Win32 headers were generated
>by looking at documentation and then adding equivalent definitions in
>ours.  It is not ok to copy sections from Microsoft headers into ours.
>I'll try to investigate this issue some more and send additional mail
>if there's anything more to say...
>
>> I've got my-mmsystem.h which I'll gladly donate, but at the moment
it's   
>> just Microsofts with my hacks.  
>
>That's not going to work I'm afraid.
>

Perhaps this does need some clarification then.  You mentioned that the
Win32
headers were generated by looking at "documentation" and then adding 
"equivalent" definitions.  What documentation is this and how
"equivalent"
is equivalent?  I don't want to get into too much legalese but if I were

going to try to do some of this, I would probably consult MSDN for 
documentation to start or some other good Win32 source, assuming I was 
going to ignore the headers themselves in VC++.  It seems highly likely
to 
me that any source I choose is going to be from MS.  So is it OK to look
at
documentation like this?  Personally, I don't see that much difference 
between the "cut-and-paste" operations that come from this activity and 
that which would be involved with using the headers "directly" but I get

the impression that I'm missing some important point in this regard.
Geoff,
can you clarify that point for me/us?

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