Re: Cleaning up W->A calls

[Marcelo Duarte]

James Hawkins wrote:
First I suggest you to subscribe in the list, you are welcome, thus you 
will receive all the answers from the other users.
http://www.winehq.org/mailman/listinfo/wine-devel

I recently decided to help with the development of Wine, and seeing as
how I am new to the process, I have chosen menial tasks to take on. 
This way I can learn more about Wine while contributing.

I am currently working on the janitorial task of getting rid of W->A
calls and I have a few questions about how I should implement these
changes.
Initially CryptAcquireContextW converts all of its arguments to ansi
then calls CryptAcquireContextA (which is intuitively not what we're
wanting and thus the cleanup.)  

The question is, what exactly is the best way to clean this up?
It seems to me that there are two main options as to what can be done: 

A) convert the W->A calls in the wide-char functions to A->W calls in
the asci functions and implement the wide-char functions instead, or 
 

The best is option A.
If we are to choose plan A, I have seen several different methods of
converting asci to wide-char, and I am wondering which method is best. 
for example:

dlls/advapi32/crypt.c lines 133-141
wcount = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, str, -1, NULL, 0);
wcount = wcount < wstrsize/sizeof(WCHAR) ? wcount :
wstrsize/sizeof(WCHAR);
if (wstrsize == -1)
*wstr = CRYPT_Alloc(wcount * sizeof(WCHAR));
if (*wstr)
{
MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, str, -1, *wstr, wcount);
return TRUE;
}
and,
dlls/advapi32/registry.c lines 1626-1636
LONG WINAPI RegSaveKeyA( HKEY hkey, LPCSTR file, 
LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES sa )
{
    UNICODE_STRING *fileW = &NtCurrentTeb()->StaticUnicodeString;
    NTSTATUS status;
    STRING fileA;

    RtlInitAnsiString(&fileA, file);
    if ((status = RtlAnsiStringToUnicodeString(fileW, &fileA, FALSE)))
        return RtlNtStatusToDosError( status );
    return RegSaveKeyW(hkey, fileW->Buffer, sa);
}
Which method is better/more efficient?
 

I do not cheched your code, but each situation has its reason and you 
decide which you will be better.
I suggest you to start converting something simple, like:
dlls/shell32/systray.c: shell32: Shell_NotifyIconW: illegal call to 
Shell_NotifyIconA
dlls/version/install.c: version: VerInstallFileW: illegal call to 
VerInstallFileA
When I made one of these conversions, I chose "dlls/shell32/shlexec.c: 
shell32: ShellExecuteExW: illegal call to ShellExecuteExAand" very 
laborious and was complicated. You can give one looked at as I made: 
http://cvs.winehq.com/patch.py?id=10692

I would have to argue that implementing both the asci functions and
wide-char functions separately would be the most efficient way to solve
the W->A problem.  Throughout all the wine libs, many conversion calls
are being made from W->A and A->W, when most of these calls could be
left out.  I think performance would improve without all of the
conversion calls.  Granted the size of the code would increase, but
speed would also increase.
 

Yes, but the bugs duplicates, the code increases and the future I 
believe that the majority of the programs is in unicode.

There are a couple snags when it comes to implementing asci and
wide-char functions independently, but that can be discussed later.
If I'm totally off the mark, let me know, and if there are other jobs I
could be doing, let me know as well because I would like to contribute,
but I'm not exactly sure what to do yet.  Thankyou for your time.
James Hawkins
 

 

I wait to have helped.
---
Marcelo Duarte