ActCtx or "Fusion" is part of WinSxS yes, and activation contexts can be built from manifest files, registry, app compat, so we don't have to necessarily use the "Winxs" part which is manifest-only, but rather leverage the actual "Fusion" backend.

FYI, a lot of people don't know this, but those 14000 folders/files in WinSxS are actually sym (or hard?) links. Explorer shows you that the folder is xx GB but in fact it's tiny --  most of those DLLs are symlinks to the real ones in system32.

Best regards,
Alex Ionescu

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 9:51 PM, David Quintana (gigaherz) <gigaherz@gmail.com> wrote:
Hmm I may be completely mistaken but doesn''t Windows use the ActCtx stuff for compatibility profiles? Wouldn't we be able to use "forward-compatibility" profiles? If that's right, it may be the cleanest system for it.

On 7 March 2015 at 22:38, Jerome Gardou <jerome.gardou@reactos.org> wrote:


Le 07/03/2015 22:21, Timo Kreuzer a écrit :
Am 07.03.2015 um 20:04 schrieb Colin Finck:
Am 07.03.2015 um 13:44 schrieb Timo Kreuzer:
The file system
redirection would redirect system32 into merged folders, containing the
version specific DLLs, while everything that is not existing in this
folder will be taken from the original system32. Potential naming
scheme: system32.601 system32.602, etc.
Isn't that the same problem WinSxS tries to solve? Do we really need to
introduce another folder scheme for multiple DLL versions here?
AFAIK SxS only works with manifests, not with registry configuration (correct me if I'm wrong), so we'd probably need a modified solution here anyway. And have you ever had a look into your Windows/winsxs folder? DLL hell 2.0! My winsxs folder on Win7 contains > 14.000 subfolders. (ok, one might take that as an argument, that another few hundred or thousand wouldn't hurt so much ;-))
You're not wrong, but we could store the manifest into the registry. With a nice config tool, that would be completely transparent to the user.


Okay, SxS manages one DLL per folder while your idea is to have folders
with multiple DLLs of the same version. But if we do file system
redirection anyway, this should be solvable. Or am I missing something here?
I don't see the relationship between FS redirection and SxS. If we do the former, we don't need the latter. In fact FS redirection wouldn't work very well in an environment, where each DLL lives in it's own folder.


We need full SxS support anyway, so why not make use of it for this
task as well?

I just think that a wow64 like FS redirection might be the cleanest and easiest approach. We are not going to handle all kinds of different DLL versions in all kinds of mixes, just a relatively small set of major OS versions. And each of them with a pretty consistent set of DLLs.
But that doesn't mean that I would rule out sxs. If we can easily provide an sxs solution, that doesn't result in a huge mess, we can go that way.

Timo 




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