[ros-dev] Undocumented APIs

[Robert Shearman]

James Tabor wrote:

> Hi!
> Magnus Olsen wrote:
>
>> Then accoring  "2. There exists a third party driver/application 
>> using the
>> behavior" then we can  remove whole pnp, directx, win32k, rpc, 
>> network, usb
>> and more. alot of api is undoc or is wrong. WHat we have left no reactos
>> and I agesnt it. alot of manufactor using undoc api in lowlevel and u 
>> need
>> implement it right.  and I do not like we have vote on it. let us 
>> work on
>> how to implement stuff as we have always done.
>>
> Wine is starting to fall into this trap too. If this policy goes into 
> place
> we will have to write up documents for these unknown apis and explain 
> what
> they do. Eventually we will publish M$ api for them w/o M$ giving it 
> to the EU.


Why is this a bad thing? So, Wine has documentation for many functions 
(which is in some cases more comprehensive than MSDN). If a Wine 
developer comes along and uses the documentation and she now produces 
better code because she has better documentation to work from. If a 
Win32 developer comes along and uses the documentation then Wine gets 
free publicity.

The same argument applies for ReactOS.

-- 
Rob Shearman