[Debootloaders-miboot] removing miboot dependency on Apple headers

[Sven Luther]

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 11:12:07PM +0100, Piotras wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've started to work on removing miboot dependency on Apple header
> files. My plan is to add missing constants, types and inline functions
> to header files from libmacos (emile).
> 
> As far as I know all of the missing:
>  * constants (symbol names and assigned values),
>  * types (their names and defined internal structure as well as
>    the representation in memory; this includes field names and
>    types names for composite structures) and
>  * inline functions (for functions that are trivial wrappers for
>    the processor traps used to call MacOS ROM)
> are part of MacOS ROM binary interface, and as such should not be
> covered by copyrights.

Indeed, i had this selfsame discussion with a member of the FSF during
debconf'03 in Oslo, concerning the information of the amiga fast file system,
for which i was adding support in parted (a gnu project and cpyright assigned
to them).

As such, you can copy the headers content, but should remove or rewrite the
comments.

> I plan to base my work on published documentation that is copyrighted
> by Apple (I'm attaching the full text from one of the Inside Macintosh
> books). The documentation includes full Pascal and C declaration
> of most (maybe all) required types and possibly constants. It seems
> that in most cases the types and constants I will add to libmacos would
> look identical as these in the documentation.

Indeed.

> For the inline functions I've seen the Apple header files and in
> number of cases reverse-engineered their representation (short
> sequences of opcodes) in the past.

Ok.

> Aurélien and Sven, can you think of any possible (copyright-related)
> problems with this plan?

The only problematic issues would be the inline functions, but i have some
serious doubts of apple taking exception to this since it concerns hardware
almost 10 years old, and is totally unrelevant to any modern apple hardware,
not counting the intel ones.

Friendly,

Sven Luther