Registry tools

So for wine-doors 0.2 I need to have the ability to create registry patches between two bottles. The reason for this is our bottles architecture is unique in that it allows you to merge dependencies into the bottles by means of symbolic linking and registry patching. So for instance if I have two bottles, one of which is a bottle which depends on the first then the files from the first will be symbolically linked into the second, then the registry patches will be applied and voila, one bottle does not (in theory, and its mostly down to implementation) have the ability to break out of its bottle and into the wine system at large.

The reasons for this system are plentiful. Firstly each bottle is completely independent of all others, even when they depend on each other, this means that there won’t be registry conflicts (like IE6 problems we had such a hard time with) and other strange, difficult to track bugs appearing when people install multiple libraries. Secondly this provides a nice sandbox security system preventing viruses and other malware infecting the whole wine configuration. There are many other reasons, and I’ve thought long and hard about how to achieve this kind of feature. The intention of course is to make the wine experience stable for as many applications as the user wishes to install.

Simply put, zen in the art of wine bottling.

Link to: Full Article