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. . .
I know there are linux applications that access the windows registry - and those are the only ones I can think of that would actually benefit from this, and even those would need modification to access Wine's registry if we did have binary compatibility with windows.
. . .
If I'm completely wrong and there are applications that do this, please tell me and I'll gladly put my foot in my mouth lol - but as far as I know, such a move wouldn't really do much for us except let us say, "We're compatible with windows' registry file format". . .
hmm. .
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.
I have the latest release of ReactOS running on QEMU on my box, so I checked it out. Basically, they're using the same regedit program from Wine, missing find command and all (Which I too feel is a pain in the neck). I looked at the config stuff, and I found what looked like some binary database files for each of the main registry sections. Unfortunately, there's no documentation at all on any of this on their website. If we decide to go this route, we may be in for a hell of a lot of work. But, I do agree with all of your points. I think the current system could use some improvement, especially in the area of searching. Let me know what you think of all this.
Kind Regards, James Liggett
Thanks everyone for keeping this topic active, I'm glad so many people are interested.
--Brad DeMorrow