nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> nemesis wrote:
>> Windows has both of those. :-)
> 
> Of course.  But registry simply kills it in the name of ease for users, at the
> expense of making it difficult and annoying to "fine-tune" your system.

I'm not sure what that sentence means.   If you mean the registry is harder 
to edit, I'd have to disagree. YMMV.

>> The registry is just a more general solution.
> Is it really worth the pain?  

Yes. When you start writing programs that need to (for example) set 
environment variables for every user in a particular list, or to modify the 
configuration of something already there, you realize that having a standard 
way of storing configuration is a benefit.

Compare code to (say) list all configured document roots in Apache with all 
configured document roots in IIS.  Compare code that installs a new web-app 
to an Apache configuration to an IIS configuration, without disturbing 
what's already set up. Include the effort required to write a parser for 
Apache configuration. Now include the effort to write the parser for MySql 
configuration, PHP configuration, and half a dozen other configurations. 
Include the code to *find* the appropriate configuration files, without 
assuming they're necessarily in the default places.

Compare code to (say) set the POVRAY_BETA environment variable to a new 
value at the next login for everyone in the Administrators group on the 
entire domain of Windows machines compared to setting it for everyone in the 
wheel group for an entire company in a Linux-based company.

Write code to find all the machines within your domain with the old version 
of a particular COM component installed, and replace it with the new 
version.  (That's why it's called the "registry" after all.) Now do the same 
for your favorite X-Windows widget you wrote and that you compiled from your 
own sources.

It's not always worth the "pain" as you say, but when you're writing 
professional-grade software, it makes things a lot easier to manage if all 
your configuration information is in a standard format. Substituting "some 
text file somewhere under /etc, or maybe /sys, or maybe /proc" doesn't 
really compare.

> At work we use Delphi and now and then when we
> have to install or update plugins it's always a terrible annoyance involving
> manual and stupid registry editing.

Well, that's stupid software. There are ways of avoiding that, but if one 
doesn't know what they are, one's software probably won't do things right.

> Ease of use is to simply go /searchthis, edit it in whatever way you like, copy
> it around as many times you want and delete it with a simple dd.  Nothing like
> a plain list of key=value strings...

Well, yeah, if all your configuration is in .INI files, that might make 
sense. (I never used dd to delete files, at least not selectively. ;-) If 
you have complex structured configuration, then you need a more complex 
interface to the registry, which is usually easy-to-trivial to implement in 
the event that your software is broken.

Follow-ups yet again redirected. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Why is there a chainsaw in DOOM?
   There aren't any trees on Mars.

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