2005/6/19, James Liggett jrliggett@cox.net:
Hi Brad, I've been following you discussion about wine's registry format, and I find it interesting. I gave it some thought, I have have an idea. Have you thought about using XML as a potential format? Since the registry is a non-relational tree database, this seems to fit quite well. Plus, there's a few libraries that would do the dirty work for us (libxml, expat, many others, name your pick). It could even be possible to modularize the registry using technologies like XInclude or XLink. Just thought I'd offer my two cents.
Sure, the tree format would match. But this would not really make things better. You would also have to read the registry at once at startup time. The best solution would be to use native Windows registry format. This way you could use real Windows registry files, and can read and update registry piecewise. It's organized like a little file system - or database if you want to see it this way. It's not documented. But you could have a look at the ReactOS implementation, which claimes to be compatible to NT4.
Regards,
Martin