
MS is open-sourcing PDB format - insulanian
https://github.com/Microsoft/microsoft-pdb
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laported
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 :)

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dozzie
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
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
> "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
So it's a closed protocol because it's hard to understand? That doesn't seem
to make much sense.

~~~
dozzie
No. It's closed because there's no specification or even an alternative
implementation and you can't easily derive one.

