http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10114
--- Comment #8 from Artem S. Tashkinov t.artem@mailcity.com 2007-10-21 08:12:33 --- Austin, I haven't understood your intentions, probably you were trying to show me that registry is indeed changed every time when someone runs notepad.
Anyway I'd like to stress, that wineserver will rewrite the registry files no matter what you run. You can do this simple test:
strace -f -s 300 -o /tmp/wine wine cmd
then type 'exit' or press 'Ctrl' + 'D'
(run it several times).
You will then notice that registry files are rewritten.
So actually there are two bugs here:
1) wineserver doesn't track registry modification and dumps the registry files every time when a particular application exits
and
2) IMO, registry files should be stored in whatever SQL backend so that a) it's not necessary to load the entire registry into memory upon start b) it's very easy to dump modified or newly created registry keys
SQLite (library) seems to be the best solution here due to its unconfined license, effectiveness, small size and ubiquitousness