Wine's Registry Format

[Brad DeMorrow]

David Lee Lambert wrote:

>On Thursday 16 June 2005 11:20 pm, you wrote:
>  
>
>>On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 22:22:56 +0200, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Actually the current method is probably the fastest for everything
>>>except the initial read.
>>>      
>>>
>>The only reason that the current method is fast is because we're loading
>>the entire registry into memory.  As stated in Bugzilla, this is fine for
>>small registries, but the author of the bug has noted wineserver allocated
>>up to 30MB when wine initiates JUST for the registry!
>>    
>>
>
>How do you propose to keep track of multiple sources of the registry data?  At 
>one time Wine supported system-wide registry files as well as per-user ones,  
>and some people would like to see that again.
>  
>
       I'm not certain what you mean by multple sources of the registry 
- but if you're clearifying yourself with your second sentence here, I'm 
sure it I could bring back that feature if I get the opportunity to and 
allow system registry files as well as user registry files.

>  
>
>>Using BerkeleyDB to access the registry would provide the kind of
>>random-access that we need for such a large amount of information
>>    
>>
>
>Samba already uses something called 'TDB', and it's been suggested that the 
>two projects could share a case-insensitive-filename layer based on it;  
>could you look into using that?
>
>  
>
       I've not heard of this 'TDB' before, nor do I know anything about 
that situation, however, again - given the opportunity - I will look 
into whatever the community wants before I make any decisions about how 
the project will be done.

>>- It 
>>would also provide us with a quicker and easier way to search through the
>>registry - so we could finally implement the Find feature in wine's
>>regedit without much effort ( Not that it couldn't be done as is, but
>>things would definitely be easier ).
>>    
>>
>
>This could only be done at the expense of several times increase in on-disk 
>storage, and would actually not be used very much.  
>  
>
       I'm not certain you're correct there, and I've been frustrated 
before when wine's regedit has that menu item disabled when I wanted to 
use it lol :)

       At any rate, again, I'm not saying one way or the other about how 
this is going to work yet (if at all).  I'll look into it.

>A more useful enhancement would be to support PCRE syntax for 
>find-and-replace,  or multiple views of data, or version-control of the 
>registry... in fact,  there are Windows programs that do all that,  and all 
>they require is a good, stable, quick implementation of the registry calls,  
>which is what Wine provides.
>  
>
       I agree with you there, that would be a nice feature to have - 
especially if the registry goes binary. . . I'm sure there are some 
people that would normally use techniques like that with their current 
registry files. . .

       Again, however, I'm not doing anything except research until 
Alexandre gives me the 'go ahead'. 

Thanks everyone who has been throwing out ideas, they're helpful and 
extremely appreciated.

--Brad DeMorrow