On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Steven Edwards wrote: [...]
It sounds like a good idea and it might work for WINE but the Windows registry is a bloated mess. I have seen Windows registrys get to 40mb+. Adding more keys for documentation like this is just going to make the memory requirements higher and performance worse.
True, registry size is an issue. On the other hand we would only add doc for the Wine configuration settings which should not be that numerous. So the size and performance impact should not be too bad (unless we get sloppy and add myriads of Wine settings).
If you wanted to go to a binary format, the ReactOS developers have offered to relicense the code we have as LGPL so you might be able to do this without much of a performance hit. Anyway I havent used WINE on *nix in a while so i dont know if this really is a issue but its something to think about. I am not sure about the compression and performance numbers so it might not be a issue for WINE at this point.
I think Wine will want to go towards a binary 'database-like' registry format eventually. One goal is to not have to load the whole registry on startup. This is especially useful when the registry is large like after installing MS Office or when using the Windows registry. The performance of loading the registry used to be abysmal but it was improved greatly a couple of years ago and since then it's not a big issue anymore.