Strainge ChocoDoom behaviour with ZDL

Mike.Reiner said:

It doesn't need to be FAT32, nor a hard drive from 1996 for the registry to give you hell.

I do not see any actual reasons to got registry broken. FAT32 could be a reason easily, because FAT is not safe. Just press reset and your database/fat/etc could turn to a trash.

Did I understand incorrectly?

Graf: Registry is a shit!
repter: Registry is cool!
graf: You can't vote, because you had no broken Registry

I do not see any problems with Registry. If I want to save some settings (before migrating or something) I can have batches:

SaveSettings.bat

@echo off
rem    This batch file saves Far settings from the registry
rem    to files FarSave1.reg and FarSave2.reg

regedit /ea FarSave1.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Far
regedit /ea FarSave2.reg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Far

@echo off
rem    This batch file restores Far settings from previously saved
rem    files FarSave1.reg and FarSave2.reg to the registry

if not exist FarSave?.reg goto import

echo REGEDIT4 > "%TEMP%\$DelOld$.reg"
echo [-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Far] >> "%TEMP%\$DelOld$.reg"
echo [-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Far] >> "%TEMP%\$DelOld$.reg"

start/wait regedit -s "%TEMP%\$DelOld$.reg"
del "%TEMP%\$DelOld$.reg" > nul

:import
echo REGEDIT4 > "%TEMP%\$DelCache$.reg"
echo [-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Far\PluginsCache] >> "%TEMP%\$DelCache$.reg"
start/wait regedit -s FarSave1.reg FarSave2.reg "%TEMP%\$DelCache$.reg"
del "%TEMP%\$DelCache$.reg" > nul

entryway said:

graf: You can't vote, because you had no broken Registry

Not myself but I once had the pleasure to help someone clean up such a mess.

And no matter what you think, nobody will ever be able to convince me that it is good design to store all configuration data for all applications in one huge file that's - even worse - not in text format.

I've once, maybe twice, had a corrupted registry and also had to try and help other people who have had one too.

It's just a file and any file can get corrupted. Putting so much system critical information into one place is not a sensible design IMO. The non-friendly format of the file exacerbates the situation.

Ironically, I had a minor registry problem last night. My son was messing around with the Elder scrolls Construction Kit and loaded a new race into Oblivion which promptly hung the computer, requiring a hard reset (pretty unusual in my experience of XP - Ctrl-Alt-Del is usually possible). When the computer restarted, the registry had a bunch of errors in it and the machine had forgotten that it had any CD drives.

All fixed now. In fact the XP recovery routines made it a pretty simple job but, the fact remains, Oblivion crashing damaged a very important file and the consequences could easily have been much worse.

entryway said:

I do not see any problems with Registry. If I want to save some settings (before migrating or something) I can have batches:

I believe your script highlights a problem with the registry very clearly. If you were on any kind of *nix (be it Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, whatever), you'd just copy $HOME/.far. That's it. No undocumented commands to be used, just cp.

As I understand, the original purpose of the registry (back with Win for Workgroups 3.11) was to store all of the Windows configuration settings in one place. Which is a pretty good idea in concept. However, the history as I have learned it says that Microsoft started storing all sorts of other settings for MS products, and then it sort of went downhill from there. The end result is pretty much the most bloated system configuration file that has ever existed.

There's always C:\DOOMDATA for the nostalgics...

Suffice to say I will not be changing Chocolate Doom to store configuration settings in the registry. The end.

I don't think anyone actually suggested that, but rather from the topic it seems the suggestion was to use Windows' user-specific application configuration directory. NT 3.x-XP all have a single location for it (%APPDATA%), and Vista has three different locations that developers are supposed to pick at random apparently (Microsoft's own applications don't show any consistency for this)... of course, Windows 95/98/Me have no such concept, so it would completely end support for those antique GUIs but I doubt many will miss it.

At any rate since Win32's filesystem structure bears great resemblance to MS-DOS (WinNT natively doesn't have any drive letter nonsense, but that's outside the scope of this topic), I don't really see any need to change from vanilla behavior. Microsoft has trained users to always run as administrator, so you can reasonably expect people to always have write access to the Chocolate Doom directory and/or C:\DOOMDATA, else the users themselves can have Chocolate Doom stored in their own directory they can write to (Doom is very small compared to the size of today's hard disks)...

Maybe. The situation changes a bit under Vista though, as applications are not allowed to write in Program Files (or the x86 variant under Vista64). Instead attempts to write to files there are slight-of-handed by the OS and the actual files themselves are squirrelled away elsewhere.

DaniJ said:

Instead attempts to write to files there are slight-of-handed by the OS and the actual files themselves are squirrelled away elsewhere.

And it's that "squirreling away" that really gets my goat. I like to know why the files actually are. I don't want the OS hiding them for me or pretending they are somewhere other than where they really are.