> What happens if you have an extensible app, say Microsoft Office, which enumerated it's own subkeys to discover 3rd party plugins?
Then you have Microsoft Office/Plug-Ins/plugin-guid, whereby Plug-Ins is user writable
> What if an app provides COM services and needs to write that to a centralized location that is enumerated to discover available COM services?
If it is providing services it can write, if it enumerates it can read. You can also have multiple levels, like HKLM (machine) and HKLU (the user).
> What if your app happens to be a god-awful HP Print Center app with it's own print drivers and a Windows Service, where it needs to write to a central location that is enumerated for device drivers and Windows Services?
May God help you. No, but you would have, again like above, a central location you could write to. Up to the Admin if Joe can write to this location or only privileged processes.
It's just, a lot of this was not enforced, only partially (from the windows side when it looks for things), so for everyone else, it's a free for all.
The biggest disadvantage on the Linux side is that something like Group Policy is ridiculously difficult, because every app has it's own location and DSL, and sometimes you have one, central, config file, and sometimes the app is considerate with something like override.d.
Then you have Microsoft Office/Plug-Ins/plugin-guid, whereby Plug-Ins is user writable
> What if an app provides COM services and needs to write that to a centralized location that is enumerated to discover available COM services?
If it is providing services it can write, if it enumerates it can read. You can also have multiple levels, like HKLM (machine) and HKLU (the user).
> What if your app happens to be a god-awful HP Print Center app with it's own print drivers and a Windows Service, where it needs to write to a central location that is enumerated for device drivers and Windows Services?
May God help you. No, but you would have, again like above, a central location you could write to. Up to the Admin if Joe can write to this location or only privileged processes.
It's just, a lot of this was not enforced, only partially (from the windows side when it looks for things), so for everyone else, it's a free for all.
The biggest disadvantage on the Linux side is that something like Group Policy is ridiculously difficult, because every app has it's own location and DSL, and sometimes you have one, central, config file, and sometimes the app is considerate with something like override.d.