the registry

[Kenneth Porter]

--On Saturday, July 24, 2004 10:47 AM +0100 Paul 
<paul at all-the-johnsons.co.uk> wrote:

>> This at first read sounds like a candidate for stupid question of the
>> year.  But on reconsidering, maybe windows did something right by
>> consolidating all those *.conf files scattered all over hell into one
>> file
>
> I can't disagree more strongly with that if I tried.
>
> Sure it may be a slight pain to have a large number of conf files
> in /etc, but when the registry gets damaged under Windows, that's it -
> you're knackered.

Note that the registry is not a single file. It's several files, and each 
user has his own "current user" hive, not unlike the way each Linux user 
has dot files in his home directory.

The registry is sort of like a filesystem, with a similar hierarchical 
structure. The hierarchy is reasonably laid out, and one can usually find 
what one needs in it as rapidly as one can find equivalent settings in the 
Linux /etc and home dotfile trees. In fact, I'd say that /etc is rather 
chaotic and organic and could use some of the structure one currently finds 
in Window's HKLM and HKR hives.

The registry's real problem is that it's *not* a filesystem, so one needs 
very specialized tools to manipulate it. The Unix philosophy is that 
everything is a file, and that means that any tool that understands files 
abstractly can manipulate virtually any Unix object. I feel crippled using 
the Windows registry because I can't do the same with it.

One of the features of the Reiser filesystem is that it handles very small 
files efficiently. It would be a great way to implement a registry, and I 
believe it was targeted at the problem of storing Gnome's many small 
settings in tiny files without wasting lots of space.