From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 26205 invoked by alias); 6 Feb 2002 16:56:57 -0000 Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Received: (qmail 26158 invoked from network); 6 Feb 2002 16:56:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO darius.concentric.net) (207.155.198.79) by sources.redhat.com with SMTP; 6 Feb 2002 16:56:56 -0000 Received: from mcfeely.concentric.net (mcfeely.concentric.net [207.155.198.83]) by darius.concentric.net [Concentric SMTP Routing 1.0] id g16Gutk02084 for ; Wed, 6 Feb 2002 11:56:55 -0500 (EST) Errors-To: Received: from Clemens.cris.com (da003d0322.sjc-ca.osd.concentric.net [64.1.1.67]) by mcfeely.concentric.net (8.9.1a) id LAA20813; Wed, 6 Feb 2002 11:56:53 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <5.1.0.14.2.20020206082639.00a9eb48@pop3.cris.com> X-Sender: rrschulz@pop3.cris.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.1 Date: Wed, 06 Feb 2002 08:56:00 -0000 To: cygwin@cygwin.com From: Randall R Schulz Subject: Re: /dev/registry In-Reply-To: <032a01c1af00$bde8dca0$a7eb0544@CX535256D> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed X-SW-Source: 2002-02/txt/msg00258.txt.bz2 Barubary, The motivation for a file-system reflection of the Windows registry is to open it up to programs not written in a Windows native language (C, C++, VB, etc.). Doing this would give all manner of scripts (shell, Perl, Python, TCL, etc.) access to the registry in one fell swoop. That is one of the beautiful things about the Unix approach of fitting so much of a system's facilities into the unified framework of the file system. As the discussion has shown, however, if the underlying facility is not a good match for Unix's file model, this approach falls down. The Windows registry appears to be at the boundary of this issue, given the typed nature of its entries. The suffix approach or, perhaps, a terminal directory holding entries like ".dword" or ".sz" would presumably suffice. The suggestion about ioctl() begs the question of where to get the file descriptor to which to apply the ioctl() call, and does not open the registry to scripting languages that have no direct access to the Cygwin or Windows APIs. It does not really simplify the task of adding the ability to Cygwin, but obscures the basic access behind the obscure and overloaded catch-all interface that is ioctl(). It is true that this would make inadvertent registry corruption less likely, but it only by virtue of making so much less accessible. Randall Schulz Mountain View, CA USA At 03:23 2002-02-06, Barubary wrote: >Why can't this /dev/registry stuff be just an ioctl()? Open the >/dev/registry node for the appropriate access, then use some ioctl()'s to >read and write it. Put the /dev/null entry points for the read and write >handlers for /dev/registry and you won't have that accidental corruption >from cat. > >By the way, if you're using Cygwin, why can't you just call >RegQueryValueExW and friends yourself? You're a Win32 process anyway, and >no UNIX has such a thing - don't care about portability. > >-- Barubary -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Bug reporting: http://cygwin.com/bugs.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/