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MS is open-sourcing PDB format

• dozzie 11y ago
  File format cannot be open sourced. Tool for working with the format can, or the format can have published specification. Format itself doesn't have source code.
  • Hydraulix989 11y ago
    To be clear, what was "open sourced" was a C header file containing struct definitions and parsing functions for that file format. An implementation could be considered one way of providing a format/protocol specification.
    • dozzie 11y ago
      > "open sourced" was a C header file [...] Indeed. In my opinion too little to call it a day, but I haven't worked on implementing file handling, so I may be wrong here. > An implementation could be considered one way of providing a format/protocol specification. Not quite. Look at OpenVPN, which has hilarious situation: code is open, but protocol is effectively closed. You can't practically derive the protocol from OpenVPN's source (yes, I tried that). Unless you can put weeks of effort, of course.
      • analognoise 11y ago
        So it's a closed protocol because it's hard to understand? That doesn't seem to make much sense.
        • dozzie 11y ago
          No. It's closed because there's no specification or even an alternative implementation and you can't easily derive one.
• laported 11y ago
  This brings back some fond memories. One of the first interesting projects I worked on professionally was a post-mortem debugger that ran under OS/2. We used Microsoft's compilers and it was a bit of a challenge to reverse engineer enough of the debugging symbols to make something useful. Definitely could have used this back then :)