On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Dave Korn wrote:
> On 03 March 2006 16:02, Igor Peshansky wrote:
>
> >> I'm not quite sure how to handle the mapping from file types to
> >> registry key types, but there might be some simple way which I'm just
> >> too blind to see.
> >
> > Hmm, there is currently no way for the programs to find out the
> > registry key type, unless we introduce new functionality into stat()
> > or something.
> >
> > As it is, why would the programs need to know the key type, anyway?
>
> Because they aren't writing it for their own benefit, but in order for
> it to be read by some other app that requires it to be of a specific
> type.
>
> > They just write the data, and fhandler_registry takes care of
> > converting it to the right format (using arbirtary conventions of some
> > sort). The only potential problems are REG_MULTI_SZ and REG_EXPAND_SZ
> > (in the former case it's a question of picking a string delimiter, and
> > in the latter it's about annotating expandable values).
> >
> > Am I missing something?
>
> You're thinking of the registry as some place where a program puts its
> own private data and reads it back and therefore assuming that it
> doesn't matter what actually is /in/ the registry as long as the program
> gets back the exact same stuff it put in there, but sometimes programs
> want to alter or set registry values for external apps that require a
> specific type. If cygwin chose a type and didn't provide a way to
> specify, this feature would be of much more limited use as you couldn't
> use it to modify an existing value because cygwin might decide to write
> it back as a different type and break whatever-it-was that depended on
> it.
Actually, I did think of registry as shared data, but I also assumed that
the creation of value files would be separate from writing to them, and
that the actual writing would not change the type.
That still might not be a bad approach -- maybe introduce extra,
registry-specific, flags for open() that reflect the file (i.e, key) type,
and then implement writes to the files based on those flags... Just
another alternative to consider...
Igor
--
http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
|\ _,,,---,,_ [EMAIL PROTECTED] | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!)
|,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' old name: Igor Pechtchanski
'---''(_/--' `-'\_) fL a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-. Meow!
"Las! je suis sot... -Mais non, tu ne l'es pas, puisque tu t'en rends compte."
"But no -- you are no fool; you call yourself a fool, there's proof enough in
that!" -- Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac"
