Re: [Patch] regtool: Add load/unload commands and --binary option

[Christian Franke <Christian dot Franke at t-online dot de>]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> I applied the patch.  

Thanks.

> I just had to reformat your ChangeLog slightly
> (a TAB before all lines, no extra indentation for lines which don't
> start with a '*').
>   
SeaMonkey expands tabs to spaces...
Will use attachment for ChangeLog next time.

> Btw., since you seem to be interested in hacking the registry...  would
> you also be interested to introduce registry write access below
> /proc/registry inside of the Cygwin DLL?  That would be extra cool.
>   

In fact I had the idea to hack the registry, in particular fix the read 
access to registry values starting with backslash:

$ cd /proc/registry/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/MountedDevices
$ ls
...
\DosDevices\C:
\DosDevices\D:
...
$ cat \\DosDevices\\C:
cat: \DosDevices\C:: No such file or directory

Using a URL-like "%XX" encoding for invalid characters (/\?%) may be the 
right thing to do.

$ ls
...
%5cDosDevices%5cC:

I found that all standard ascii chars except ^ % ` are used in value names

> 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.
>   

Because POSIX has no notion about file types, the type has to be somehow 
encoded into the name if a new key is created.
The major drawback of this approach is that the read path is different 
from the write path.

I would suggest to add a second R/W view to the registry where both path 
are identical.
A type extension should be added via a rarely used character:

$ ls /proc/registry/SUBKEY
reg_sz_value
reg_binary_value
reg_dword_value

$ ls /proc/registry-rw/SUBKEY
reg_sz_value,sz
reg_binary_value,bin
reg_dword_value,dword

Then you should have the ability to copy subkeys to file trees and vice 
versa:
cp -r /dev/registry-rw/SUBKEY /tmp/SUBKEY
rm -r /dev/registry-rw/SUBKEY
cp -r /tmp/SUBKEY /dev/registry-rw/SUBKEY

Suggest to start a new thread for this discussion....

Christian