Using ReactOS Registry format

Shachar Shemesh wine-devel at shemesh.biz
Wed Jun 22 04:28:09 CDT 2005


Brad DeMorrow wrote:

> James Liggett wrote:
>
>> Brad,
>> Last night Martin Fuchs suggested that we look into using ReactOS's
>> registry format in order to be compatible with Windows registry
>> databases.
>>
>    I'm really not convinced that we need to be compatible with 
> Windows' registry file format at that level. . .  That would only 
> benefit applications that don't use the Win32API to access the 
> registry - and as far as I know, Windows doesn't allow you to access 
> the registry like that, so there shouldn't be any applications that 
> would benefit from that. . .

How about an application that carries a binary registry hive around, and 
uses "LoadHive" to merge it (temporarily) into the registry?

How about deploying Wine in such a way that it uses the existing user 
profile, user.dat and all? User.dat is a registry file, that goes 
through load hive.

The way I see the ultimate outcome, Wine should have "Registry 
providers". These would allow it to use several different registry back 
ends. The default one would probably be the one used today, but this way 
we could plug in an SQL back end if needed, as well as a Windows 
compatible one, if needed.

Comments welcome.

> I suppose one benefit of this would be the ability to copy the 
> registry from an actual windows drive to Wine. . . - but I think using 
> a helper application for that would probably take care of that, and 
> I'm still convinced that we shouldn't try to use the actual windows 
> registry format.

But what about actually using said registry, including modifying it?

       Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/




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