On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 11:55 PM, Stephen Chrzanowski <pontiac76 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Prior to release or otherwise, it feels that if MSoft were to have skipped > the registry and just used the GROUP->KEY=VALUE setup in INI files only, > things would be much better as far as cleaning up viruses at LEAST, > especially if you start locking down these files at the NTFS level. But > then again, if they used an actual SQL system (Like their own) for managing > registry entries, things would be so much easier with a DELETE statement. > Individual programs could have their OWN "registry" file instead of crap > ending up all over the place. Backing up an entire application would be a > snap as relevant entries pointing at specific DLLs would come with the > application base or at least configured upon install...... Ohhh the mind > is wandering. > Perhaps a bit off topic, but: At my day job, we write software for backup / disaster recovery of Windows partitions, including virtual boot of previously physical environments. As a result, we have to do a bit of registry manipulation. Our software targets both Windows and Linux systems. When we need to manage a registry hive from Linux land, we use a LGPL library called hivex. When we need to do that in Windows, historically we had to load an offline registry hive into the running registry, make whatever changes were needed, then unload the file. I recently discovered a redistributable Microsoft DLL called "offreg" for offline registry access. It avoids (in Windows) the need to attach an offline hive to the online registry. For Windows applications that have a need for registry files, offreg.dll (combined with hivex for cross platform compatibility) greatly simplify registry maintenance. I wrote a wrapper around offreg.dll to make it source compatible with hivex (which we were already using) so that future projects wouldn't need quite so much "#ifdef WINDOWS" style code. If a windows app was bound and determined to use a registry style datastore, offreg.dll could provide a lot of the benefits outlined above. Still no SQL interface. Hmmm, maybe a VFS or virtual table for SQLite... -- Scott Robison
