[ros-kernel] Build system - edf files

[Aliberti Emanuele]

Martin Fuchs wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this may seem to be a silly question to some people, but however...
> I could not find an answer by looking into helper.mk
> 
> What are .edf files are used for?
> Their content is mostly identical to the .def files.

Well, I am the father of .edf files. They were born at the beginning of 
PE ReactOS, just a few monts later David Welch moved to head the CVS 
branch for Mingw (originally, ReactOS was compiled using DJPP).

The .def files are used to build the import library (.a), that is the 
client-side proxy entry points the dynamic loader patches in memory when 
the PE client image explicitly depends on a DLL (the .a file is 
statically linked in the PE client image to make happy ld).

The .edf files are used to build the export section in a PE image, 
usually for user- and kernel-mode DLLs. But also NTOSKRNL.EXE and 
WIN32K.SYS have an export section.

I was not an happy father then, but we could find no other way to get 
decorated names in .a files and undecoraded names in the export section 
of an image using a single file. I don't know if recent versions of 
Mingw/binutils can get such information from a single file.

Probably a new tool could be written in a week-end to generate .def and 
.edf from a single source. I'll look at it in the next days, just to see 
if it's that easy.