Any interest in unforking Wine/ReactOS shell32?

[jhol]

Hi Folks,

I've been following Wine's recent improvements to their desktop shell with some interest. But they have chosen to do their implementation in an ad-hoc way in explorer.exe, rather than adding the correct COM objects to shell32 as ReactOS has.

I asked the question if they would be interested in integrating ReactOS shell code if it were converted to C:
https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-d ... 13468.html

The response was quite neutral:
https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-d ... 13471.html

I think patches would be accepted if evidence could be provided that the shell32 objects were reverse engineered cleanly - not decompiled.

Is anyone interested in getting Wine and ReactOS shell32 merged together?

Best Regards
Joel Holdsworth

[dsp8195]

I like this idea and think it would be great. But the thing is - Wine team is very reluctant when things are touching the "non-vital" functionality.

I'm more than sure they don't want Wine to be used as Desktop Environment, hence why they didn't reimplemented explorer and shell32 beyond non-functional stubs, which they could do long ago.

[Z98]

Internally I'm not sure there's much of a desire to convert the entire shell32 back to just C. Wine never prioritized shell32 in the first place and whether they would invest further development time into an implementation we provide is uncertain. With these considerations, I'd say the interest here is fairly low, especially if to get our changes folded back into Wine requires we increase our maintenance burden by using only C for a library that benefits significantly from being able to utilize C++.

[hbelusca]

Clearly it's not on the ReactOS side that we will convert the C++ code in our shell32 back into C. If they want to use our shell32 code, *they* will have to convert it back to C. That's their problem, not ours. We already have our own problems taking their code and putting in ROS, they could also do an effort on their side.

[jhol]

I'm somewhat tempted to do the work myself, but I've got a lot of things in my project queue.

Does anyone know how the shell32 internals were reverse engineered? - from a licencing standpoint? Because tainted code would be a road-block to getting patches into wine.

[dizt3mp3r]

That question is going to land you in trouble or get you seriously ignored... BTW it is "licensing", the second "c" is only used if it is a noun (that is, if you are English and a Grammar Nazi).

[Blackcrack]

as lil suggestion, would not bad if in the explorer directly integrating the support for sftp and svga pictures and
other libraries what's so gives, if you look there : https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
and http://www.libressl.org/
and integrating direclty the support for tar.gz and bz2 : https://github.com/philr/bzip2-windows/releases
to be conform with the whole GPL Family (so also the possible for handle the tar, tar.gz and bz2 files.
and this directly on the start integrating too.

there a couple of links as stimulus :

bzip2-v1.0.6 dll https://github.com/philr/bzip2-windows/releases
( need Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013)

libpng16 http://www.libpng.org from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/
libcrypt-0 jpeg-v9a librsvg libgdk_pixbuf tiff wget libXpm
libressl-2.4.0 from http://www.libressl.org
7z1602 from http://www.7-zip.de
zip232dn and zip232xn Infozip from ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/win32/
zlib-1.2.8 http://zlib.net/

the svg/png libraries it is maybe good for enabling to create a folder with theming like them in KDE of icons with svg/svgz and png files
in the shell to make able to have many different icon themes, like on kde-look.org for mimetypes, Drives and folders and other in the system
(as stimulus and suggestion ..)

best regards
Blacky

[hbelusca]

Does anyone know how the shell32 internals were reverse engineered? - from a licencing standpoint? Because tainted code would be a road-block to getting patches into wine.

See gigaherz' blogs: https://www.reactos.org/blog/2924 that basically explain how he improved the shell implementation.

[Z98]

Considering that tainted code would also be a roadblock to getting something included into ReactOS, asking us if the shell code was somehow tainted comes off as extremely disingenuous.

[vicmarcal]

There's also the question of how all that internal shell32 stuff has been figured out...

Basically paying a Developer during a couple of months, who has been committing piece by piece, line by line, creating Diagrams about how it works and testing his implementation with own apitests. Then moving each dll, testing against Windows, replacing the real ones, clean and rise.

If he doesnt want to use his brain, at least he could try by reading the blog posts created when rising the new explorer.
And yes, my comment is still not half of disrispectful as his is, not just against the ReactOS project but against the work of David, Giannis and other who helped.

Spreading shit, or worse, doubts, against another opensource project is plainly stupid. Even more when ReactOS developers are committing fixes to Wine and he doesnt doubt abou their procedence, accepting them without issues.

So if he doesnt want to work on that, he can just plainly say: I dont want to spend any resources in this project. Instead using the "who knows how they have figured out" one. Which is just that, his own public excuse to avoid doing it, while spreading shit to us.

And yes: You can keep waiting if you think we are going to translate for you, our code from C++ to C. Much more after your wise, polite, and encouraging words.
Being this is his second public excuse.

[Blackcrack]

Hi vicmarcal, hi Peoples,

humm.. i think about, for what gives Meetings and voting ...
i guess for vote and hold a good way in developing and agreements then a to keep.
Why do you are not speak about this in the next IRC-Meeting
and hold this position up to be it is finish.
Easy to hold a clean and straight way .

or ?

some "trubles" in the forum, seem, like i think, only deterrent ..
okey, sometimes be humanity helpful and a sort of forgiveness okey, it needs to cause even to learning
like me.. i guess *grin*
but sometimes need a hard range for have a border for holding and bring it up in the right (way/direction),
like it was agreed to hold .
(sorry for my bad English, but i guess, you know what i meant)
so well, i am not a Programmer, but there need programmers
where arrange and then hold this what was agreed and voted in the meeting.

because you are working together to bring this Ordering system up ..
and you have to do it together to trunks, i guess, otherwise don't works..

more say i am not..
(*finger crossing to goes in the right direction now*)

best regards )))
Blacky