Re: [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